OPUS
227 (July 31, 2008). We take a long
expedition this time into the jungles of Satire—how it works
and how it sometimes doesn’t work, misfiring and shooting
itself in the foot. While The New Yorker’s recent Obama cover
is the obvious victim lately, we also review Bob Levin’s recent
biography of a particularly outrageous satirist, Hustler’s
Dwaine “Chester the Molester” Tinsley, which, unlikely as
it may be, is somehow related to the tribulations of Barry Blitt at
The New Yorker and a jailed Dutch cartoonist. We also rehearse the
history of the founding of the San Diego Comic-Con, celebrate Pickles
500th and 501st,
rejoice at the demise of Diesel Sweeties, and marvel at the endless
fakery going on in Get Your War On. And we admit to being hoaxed last
time on the Bushmiller-Beckett correspondence. Sigh. Here’s
what’s here, in order, by department:

NOUS
R US

Eight
comic books with more than 500 issues, DC finishes Spirit,
comic book biographies of Obama and McCain due in October, Diesel
Sweeties dies in print, superheroes at the
movies, two more editoonists less, Wertham’s papers off-limits, Blondie repeats

A
Review of Bob Levin’s Most Outrageous:
The Trials and Tresspasses of Dwaine Tinsley and Chester the Molester

THE
QUESTION OF SATIRE

The
New Yorker’s Obama Cover

Tasteless
Cartoons

HOAXED

The
Fabled Bushmiller-Beckett Correspondence

And
our customary reminder: don’t forget to activate the “Bathroom
Button” by clicking on the “print friendly version”
so you can print off a copy of just this lengthy installment for
reading later, at your leisure while enthroned. Without further
adieu—

NOUS
R USAll
the News That Gives Us Fits

The
granddaddy of all the mutant funnybooks, Uncanny
X-Men, reached its
500th issue as of July 23, according to Andrew A. Smith (aka “Captain
Comics”). “By my count,” Smith continues, “there
only eight current titles of the hundreds being published that have
passed that milestone.” And they are: Action
Comics, Amazing Spider-Man, Archie, Batman, Detective Comics,
Fantastic Four, Superman, and Walt
Disney’s Comics and Stories. To
celebrate the X-occasion, Marvel is moving the team to San Francisco
and giving writer Ed Brubaker a
partner, Matt Fraction. Smith wanted to know why they’re moving to the City by the Bay.
“Is it because of strong associations with the gay subculture,
to emphasize the X-Men's status as a persecuted minority?” Not
exactly, Fraction said: “It’s not just gay subculture.
... The Bay Area is where the underground goes overt. And it's a city
known worldwide for its tolerance, acceptance and celebration of the
unique and rare.” Brubaker chimed in: “Yeah, it all came
out of one of the early meetings—I just said ‘Why don't
they live in San Francisco?’ If I were I a mutant, that's where
I'd be. Somewhere you can walk down the street with your wings out
and no one will give you a second look. It just seemed to fit.”

The
DC Comics archival project reprinting all 12 years of Will
Eisner’s iconic Spirit weekly comic strip concludes with the 24th volume and the strip for October 5, 1952. Although I’ve faulted
many of DC’s archival volumes for garish color restoration, the Spirit reprints
avoided the desecration by using cream-colored paper, which reduced
the glare of the color, preserving the visual aura of the comics’
initial appearance on off-white newsprint. The project took eight
years, and Editor & Publisher hints that a 25th volume is forthcoming, reprinting the daily Spirit strip, and even a 26th volume, featuring Eisner's post-1952 work with the masked detective.
Volume 24 includes the eight 1952 “Outer Space Spirit”
installments drawn by Wally Wood in
his inimitable manner, Eisner’s last-ditch attempt to keep the Spirit going. But Wood
had trouble meeting deadlines for both Eisner and EC Comics, where he
was just beginning, and Eisner, deeply engaged in devising comics for
instructional and related purposes, hadn’t the energy or
inclination to keep the feature alive—particularly since the
circulation of the Spirit Sunday supplement was falling off: it wasn’t bringing in enough
revenue to be worth continuing.

Marvel
has produced a tribute to Steve Gerber’s iconoclastic creation in Howard the Duck
Omnibus, which purports to reprint all of the
Fated Fowl’s comic book and other appearances; the whole story
of Howard is rehearsed in Harv’s Hindsight. ... IDW Publishing
will release 28-page comic book biographies of Barack Obama and John
McCain on October 8, but the comic books can be pre-ordered, E&P notes, and they can also be purchased for downloading by mobile phone
users via GoComics.com. ... Rich Stevens’Diesel Sweeties, a
comic strip that looks as if it has been drawn by a computer in the
primitive throes of digital development when pixel lines still looked
like raisins on a string, ceases its print version in newspapers on
August 10, reports Alan Gardner at dailycartoonist.com. Stevens was
working himself to death by producing both a newspaper and a web
version of the strip. “When the workload started making me
sicker and fatter,” he said, “it was pretty much a
no-brainer which job had to go.” If Diesel
Sweeties had caught on in newspapers and
become an overnight success like, say, Calvin
and Hobbes or Zits,
Stevens might have made the contrary decision. I must admit that I’m
glad the artistic fashion statement represented by Diesel
Sweeties didn’t catch on: it threatened
to turn the art of delineation into a species of needlepoint and, in
the process, reduce me to tears accompanied by torrents of
vituperative contumely. Sorry, but I really didn’t like the
execrable appearance of this effort. You can tell, right? ... In
another ending reported by Gardner, Tribune Media Services has shut
down its Comicspage.com operation; the homepage now directs visitors
to find their favorite comic strips over at Universal Press
Syndicate’s GoComics.com (where, to spill the whole bowl of
beans, you can also sometimes find fragments of Rancid Raves, posing
as a blog). ... And in yet another ending, Gardner notes that “Danish
prosecutors have dropped charges against one of the Muslim men who
were arrested for plotting the assassination of cartoonist Kurt
Westergaard,” one of the perpetrators of the notorious Danish
Dozen.

*****

At
the movie theaters, “The Dark
Knight” blew “Iron Man” out of the water, out of
the skies, and off the planet, bringing in a reported $155 million on
the first weekend, another $75 or so the next weekend, $230 million
total. The Golden Avenger, erstwhile champion grosser for 2008,
scored only about $100 million its first week and totaled only $177.8
after two weeks. The stunning success of the Bat-movie may be due to
a morbid desire among movie-goers to see Heath Ledger’s
over-the-top final performance as the certifiably sick Joker.
Meanwhile, at MovieMaker Magazine, Lauren Barbato cobbled up a list
of ten of the best, “most popular and/or ground-breaking
graphic novel movie adaptations”; in chronological order:
“Superman: The Movie” (1978), the first of the modern
special-effects enhanced superhero flicks; “Batman”
(1989), with Michael Keaton as the Cowled Crusader and a memorable
Jack Nicholson playing the Joker and stealing the slow; “X-Men”
(2000), whose mutant abilities “made for great special effects
possibilities on screen”; “Spider-Man” &
“Spider-Man II” (2002 & 2004), setting a “new
superhero standard with energetic, big-screen renderings of Peter
Parker (Tobey Maguire) in web-slinging flight; “American
Splendor” (2003), creatively knit together fiction and reality
to illuminate the daily life of everyman Harvey
Pekar, the comic book series author, a
disgruntled file clerk played by the seemingly down-and-out Paul
Giamatti; “Hellboy” (2004), the unlikely story of a demon
who, raised by humans, decides to take their part against the forces
of the supernatural that menace from every side in Mike
Mignola’s comic book original; “V
for Vendetta” (2005), a political satire, suspense thriller and
love story, adapted from Alan Moore’s graphic novel of the same name; “Sin City” (2005), Frank
Miller’s grim black-and-white graphic
novel series brought to the big screen with the visuals nearly intact
(blazing the way for Miller to do something similar, we all suppose,
when he finishes the screen version of Will
Eisner’s Spirit for release next winter); “Persepolis” (2007), the
animated adaptation of the graphic novel, created by the latter’s
author, chain-smoking, black eyeliner-wearing Marjane
Satrapi; and “Iron Man” (2008),
which seemed to prove, thanks to Robert Downey Jr.’s
performance, that superhero movies can be successful works of
cinematic art.

At
the San Diego Comic-Con last month, Zack Snyder presented a sneak
preview of his long-awaited film version of Alan
Moore’sWatchmen, the only graphic novel to receive the prestigious Hugo Award. Snyder
is resolved to reproduce Moore’s work as exactly as the film
medium permits, and in devising the trailer he screened in San Diego,
he was determined to show pictures, he told Larry Carroll at MTV, in
order to end the debate about how close to the graphic novel the
movie will be. “I wanted to show pictures right now so people
can go, ‘Wow, I recognize that frame.’” Carroll
observed that “the centerpiece of the trailer seems to be
Doctor Manhattan's transformation,” and Snyder agreed: “Doctor
Manhattan is an interesting person to hang the movie on in a lot of
ways, because he's the conscience of the movie. His perspective on
humanity and mankind is a lot of the conscience of the movie, for me
anyway, and how he relates to the other characters is really
important. He's also spectacular in his creation, so it seemed fun.”

The
Con also saw the introduction of "DC Universe Online,” an
online videogame that lets players invent superheroes that could face
off against Superman or Batman. According to Agence France-Presse at
newsinfo.inquirer.net, “Players will be able to play as any DC
super characters or design a supernaturally powerful character of
their own. They will then get to pursue paths of good or evil”
just like in the funnybooks.

*****

Dwaine
Powell, the veteran editoonist we mentioned
last time whose paper told him on the eve of his departure for the
annual convention of the Association of American Editorial
Cartoonists (AAEC) that his full-time job was being reduced to
something akin to freelance status, has resigned rather than accept
the new role, reports the intrepid comicsreporter.com. Powell has
been with the paper, the Raleigh News &
Observer, for 33 years. Another long-time
staffer, Don Wright who editoons for the Palm Beach Post in Florida, has also been ushered out the door: he accepted a buyout,
Tom Spurgeon said. Wright, it seemed to me, filled a role on the
paper somewhat larger than editorial cartoonist. Several years ago, I
interviewed him in his office at the paper. It was evening, and most
of the staff had gone for the day. While we were talking, a youth
from the pressroom knocked on the door. Some minor crisis about what
to put in the paper where, as I recall—a layout question that
should be guided by news sense, not a printer’s convenience—and
he asked Wright about it because the cartoonist was the only
editorial staffer around. Wright answered his question, the kid went
back to the presses, and the paper came out on schedule. And this is
the kind of staff member the paper has decided it no longer needs—the
reliable, experienced knowledgeable sort. Tells us a great deal about
the state of journalism in Palm Beach, Florida. Wright, as you can
doubtless tell, is nobody’s fool: he’s 74, I understand,
and since the first buyout offers extended are usually the most
generous, he probably came out on top in the deal.

At
his website, Michael Barrier reports that Fredric Wertham’s papers, archived in the Library of Congress’s Manuscript
Division, are not available for perusal by researchers. Barrier
jumped through all the requisite hoops to get access to the trove,
but his request was, ultimately, denied by the executor of the
Wertham estate. When he asked why, since his credentials seemed to be
in order, he received this reply from Leonard C. Bruno of the
Library’s staff: “For quite some time now, the Wertham
executor has consistently rejected any and all requests for access.
These are rejected outright, with no explanation, and apparently
without consideration of the requestor's intent, affiliation,
explanation, supplication, or anything else. Even requests that have
been limited or targeted to only certain containers, rather than for
total access, have failed. Unfortunately, you have joined a growing
group of scholars unable to gain access.” About which, Barrier
remarked: “Very odd—but, as Bruno added, the executor's
arbitrary sway will soon end: the Wertham papers will come open May
20, 2010. At which point, I'm sure, a lot of irritated researchers
will join me in trying to figure out just what it was that the
executor was trying to hide.”

At
his ComicsCurmudgeon.com, John Fruhlinger reported, according to E&P,
that a recent Blondie strip was nearly identical to a 1952 Blondie. The case, E&P speculated,
may “make readers wonder how often long-running ‘legacy’
comics repeat themselves.” Today’s Blondie is drawn by John Marshall and written (or coordinated) by Dean Young, the son of the strip’s
creator, Chic Young, who was, in 1952, still producing the strip with the aid of Jim
Raymond, who was drawing it. In each of the
episodes 56 years apart, Mr. Dithers, Dagwood’s irritable boss,
is depicted “barging into the Bumstead house and bathroom to
see if the bathing Dagwood is home. In the last panel, a towel-clad
Dagwood is pictured hanging out of the window to avoid his boss.”

Iowa's
State Historical Museum in Des Moines has mounted an exhibit of the
comic strip Alley Oop to mark the 75th anniversary of the caveman comic, which was created
in 1933 by V.T. Hamlin, of
Perry, Iowa. The strip, E&P tells us, is now handled by Jack Bender,
a former Iowan, and his wife, Carole. ... The 9th Japan Expo Awards
in Paris, France last month expected over 100,000 to attend, but only
80,000 showed up, the same as last year’s number. ... In India,
P.J. George lists in The Hindu “the essential graphic novels” should you really want to
grasp the concept: Maus: A Survivor’s
Tale by Art
Spiegelman,Blankets by Craig Thompson,The
Boulevard of Broken Dreams by Kim
Deitch, Batman: The
Dark Night Returns by Frank
Miller, Watchmen by Alan Moore and 300 by Miller.

Fascinating
Footnit. Much of the news retailed in the
foregoing segment is culled from articles eventually indexed at http://www.rpi.edu/~bulloj/comxbib.html, the Comics
Research Bibliography, maintained by Michael
Rhode and John Bullough, which covers comic books, comic strips,
animation, caricature, cartoons, bandes
dessinees and related topics. It also
provides links to numerous other sites that delve deeply into
cartooning topics. Three other sites laden with cartooning news and
lore are Mark Evanier’s www.povonline.com, Alan Gardner’s www.DailyCartoonist.com, and Tom Spurgeon’s www.comicsreporter.com. And then there’s Mike Rhode’s
ComicsDC blog, http://www.comicsdc.blogspot.com For delving into the
history of our beloved medium, you can’t go wrong by visiting
Allan Holtz’s http://www.strippersguide.blogspot.com, where
Allan regularly posts rare findings from his forays into the vast
reaches of newspaper microfilm files hither and yon.

FIVE
HUNDRED PICKLES AND COUNTING

Brian
Crane’s comic strip, Pickles, reached the round-number landmark of 500 client newspapers on July 10
and then added another paper so quickly that his syndicate,
Washington Post Writer’s Group, couldn’t get the press
release out fast enough to celebrate the milestone in pristine
double-zero glory. The strip revolves around Earl and Opal Pickles,
who have been married for over 50 years and are sharing their golden
years with their 30-something daughter Sylvia, her husband Dan (who
seldom, lately, shows up), and their grandson Nelson. The household
is enlivened from time to time by a typically dense dog named Roscoe
and a cynical cat, Muffin. The press release reports that Crane was
pleased, and a little surprised, by the news. "I honestly never
thought Pickles would
be in this many papers," Crane said. "I try not to think
about it, really, or I’m sure I would probably get stage
fright. In my mind this comic strip is just something I do every day
in the privacy of my home to amuse myself, and then I mysteriously
get paid for it."

Pickles' growth has been steady for most of its 18 years, according to WPWG,
but its subscriber list has spiked recently, perhaps coincident with
the increased attention Crane has given the last few years to Earl,
who has grown more quirky with age, and Opal, whose patience enables
her to endure. Maybe it’s really time for another strip about
the golden years. Or maybe newspaper editors, for some inexplicable
reason, are finally capable of recognizing good comic strip humor and
purely competent art.

"One
cartoonist e-mailed me with news of a recent Pickles win and called Brian's strip the 'Godzilla' of the comics pages,"
said Amy Lago, comics editor for WPWG, who added that 500 clients for
a Writers Group strip is "more like 800 in 'promotion-speak."
WPWG Editorial Director Alan Shearer explained, "We've always
been honest with our numbers, because, well, we work at a newspaper.
Five-hundred [and one] is the real number of daily and Sunday
clients. And it's quite an achievement for one of the most gifted
humorists in our business." In contrast, most other feature
syndicates report “sales” not subscribing newspapers, and
since comic strips are sold separately as daily features or Sunday
features, a paper that subscribes to both dailies and the Sunday is
counted as two “sales.” Thus, a comic strip reporting a
circulation of 1,000 might appear daily in 600 papers and Sunday in
400 of the same papers.

Soon
after Pickles’ debut in 1990, Crane "retired" as an art director for an
advertising agency in Reno, Nevada, to devote his full attention to
his strip. In 1995 and 2001, Pickles was
nominated for best comic strip of the year by the National
Cartoonists Society, winning in 2001. Crane was also nominated for
the coveted Cartoonist of the Year Reuben Award in 2006.

Crane
was born in Twin Falls, Idaho, but grew up in the San Francisco Bay
area. He graduated with a degree in art from Brigham Young University
in 1973. He lives near Reno with his wife, Diana. He's the proud
father of seven and grandfather of seven.

HAVE
COMICS ARRIVED?An
Apostrophe to the San Diego Comic-Con

For
the second week running, the cover of Entertainment
Weekly was devoted to comic book superheroes:
on July 25, the impending (March 6, 2009) movie of Alan
Moore’s Watchmen, and on August 1, the
Batman movie. Status-starved funnybook fanboys may regard this as the
apogee of their aspirations, a sure sign that comic books have
“arrived” and now occupy a significant place in American
popular culture. We need no longer hide our comics behind newspapers
or physics workbooks whilst furtively reading them on the subway
going to work or in the study hall while avoiding work. It’s
been a long wait, but it’s been worth it.

Sorry,
but none of that is an accurate interpretation of what being on the
cover of EW means. In
the first place, it’s the movies that are on the cover, not the
comic books. The articles within scarcely mention the four-color
pamphlets that inspired the annual explosion of summer blockbusters
featuring one or more of the longjohn legions. Comic books, in other
words, are still down there at the bottom of the cultural slag heap.
In the second place, it’s money that’s being celebrated
on the covers. Nothing in a capitalist state achieves any sort of
status without first being proven as capable of generating vast sums
of money for those invested in the artifact. Years ago, before most
of us were born, I opined hereabouts that once comics migrated to
movies and started pulling down big bucks, the humble albeit despised
print medium would finally rise in cultural regard as an art form,
becoming the equivalent of poetry and painting in oil. I was partly
right: the money is there, guaranteeing that comics superheroes are
getting serious notice by moguls everywhere, but the humble medium is
still, as I said, humble. Maybe next year.

The
July 25 issue of EW,
while depicting Moore’s Watchmen—the pupil-less Doctor
Manhattan looming large and blue behind the Comedian, Rorschach, Nite
Owl, Silk Spectre, and Ozymandias—is also flagged “Comic-Con
Special,” and inside, following the preview of the “Watchmen”
flick, a 7-page article glimpses the movies that were to be debuted
or previewed at the Con over the July 24-27 weekend. If that’s
not “arrival” for the Comic-Con, I dunno what is. Well,
yes, I do: real, authentic “arrival” in the cultural swim
of the nation would entail more than a mere timeline diagram of the
history of the Comic-Con.

The
timeline occurs on page 27, or, rather, on half of page 27. It is
accompanied by a short 300-word story that notes that in 1970, the
Con’s first year, the infant gala reportedly drew but 300 comic
book fans to an old downtown San Diego hotel, which was creaking into
oblivion by then. Now the Con is held at the city’s gigantic
Convention Center on the waterfront, and last year, officials say it
was attended by 125,000 persons. I was there last year for two days,
signing copies of my Caniff biography, but I didn’t have time
to do a count. The timeline also observes that movies were in the mix
at the Con almost from the beginning: in 1976, “attendees were
shown slides from a movie called ‘Star Wars’ a year
before the film’s release.” (Astonished, EW repeats in disbelief, “Slides!”)

In
fact, movies were integral to the Con experience before that: Shel
Dorf, who had helped launch comic conventions
in his home town, Detroit, in 1965 (building upon the previous year’s
effort by one Robert Brosch) with the first “Detroit Triple Fan
Fair” for comics, fantasy, and movies, transported the notion
to San Diego when he moved out there late in the decade to join his
parents, who had retired there. In the 1965 “Triple Fan Fair”
program booklet, Shel appears as Chairman, saying, in a Statement of
Principles, that “by establishing this convention, we hope to
bring together people” with an interest in preserving rare
material and to foster “the appreciation of Comic Strips,
Films, and Fantasy Literature as genuine Art Forms.”
Furthermore, “we hope to draw a close bond between the creative
artist and his audience.” Here’s a caricature of Shel
(perhaps even a self-caricature in the manner of one of his heroes, Chester Gould) and a
copy of the promotional poster Shel produced in silk-screen. (Brosch has
since escaped notice into anonymous oblivion: I phoned him once to
find out more about that first comic-con in 1964, but as soon as he
heard what I wanted to talk about, he hung up on me. Comic-con
founders often suffer from a yawning lack of appropriate recognition
in their later years. The event Brosch concocted was held in April
1964; that summer, a New Yorker named Bernie Bubnis held another
convention for comics fans and, incidentally, coined the term
“comicon.” I don’t know anything about what he’s
done since either; another casualty of anonymity for comic-con
founders, I suppose.)

Although
this year’s Comic-Con is sometimes billed as the 39th,
it is actually the 40th.
The first Comic-Con was a one-day affair held March 21, 1970 to test
the waters and generate a little capital for the subsequent three-day
affair, held that summer, August 1-3, and usually counted as the
“first.” For the first Cons, Shel rounded up an
impressive list of special guests (Jack Kirby,
who attended every Con until he died in 1994, sf maven Forrest
J. Ackerman, Mike Royer, and sf authors Ray
Bradbury and A.E. Van
Vogt.) The initial venture capital was
supplied by Richard Alf, who, still a teenager, was one of the first
mail-order back-issue dealers. And a raft of savvy “in fandom,
conventions, publishing, and retail sales” was provided by Ken
Krueger, who had attended the “very
first ‘scientifiction’ convention in 1939, officially
making him a member of the elite-if-obscure group known as ‘First
Fandom.’”

I’m
quoting here cartoonist Scott Shaw, who was among the group of teenagers who had assembled under Dorf’s
wing to put on the first Con and who rehearsed the birth pangs of the
Con in the inaugural issue of his Cartoonist-at-Large in July 2005 under the heading “The
‘Secret Origin’ of San Diego’s Comic-Con.”
Shaw and some of his sf fan friends had trekked north in 1968 to
attend the World Science Fiction Convention held in Berkeley. Bitten
by the con-bug, they soon “fell in” with Krueger, who was
running a “flyblown bookstore” at Ocean Beach (perhaps
named, inexplicably, Andy’s News), where they all met to talk
about science fiction and comics. Unbeknownst to Shaw, around the
corner, figuratively speaking, was Shel Dorf, a 35-year-old
commercial artist and life-long comics collector who was meeting with
his own group of comics fans (about which, more in a trice).

Shaw
was working at a B. Dalton bookstore, where one day he encountered a
customer who was looking for a series of Prince
Valiant reprints “thinly disguised as
children’s books.” This was Bob Sourke, who, when he
learned of Shaw’s cartooning bent, invited him to a
get-together of comics fans he knew. And this group was the one
clustering around Shel.

“In
1969, Shel arranged trips for many of us to visit Jack Kirby and his
wife Roz at their home in Thousand Oaks, California,” Shaw
wrote, and out of the Kirby-fan fellowship emerged “an
amalgamated social blob that was San Diego’s core of funnybook
fandom,” which, by the fall of 1969, was planning the first
one-day con for the following March. They met at the U.S. Grant
Hotel, not “the snazziest of venues,” Shaw confessed, but
the only hotel in town “willing to risk hosting an event that
would garner such low bar-attendance” because the attendees
were mostly teenagers. (And most of them were male, Shaw says:
“”Other than young Jackie Estrada, now co-publisher [with her husband Batton
Lash] of Exhibit A Press and administrator of
the prestigious Eisner Awards, the only females attending the
300-attendee event were fans’ mothers.”) Krueger and Dorf
signed the hotel contract—“the rest of [the sponsors]
were under age,” Shaw explained.

In
1971, the Comic-Con felt healthy enough to move to a more respectable
locale, the San Diego campus of the University of California at La
Jolla, August 6-8. The next year, August 18-20, another move—this
time, to El Cortez Hotel, on a hilltop over looking downtown San
Diego. In 1973, the Con added a day, meeting August 16-19 in the
Sheraton Inn on Harbor Island, where attendance passed 1,000 for the
first time. According to a post-con report, most of the attendees,
30%, came from San Diego with an additional 15% from the surrounding
county, but almost 10% came from out-of-state. The Con generated a
$200 profit, half of which was donated to the Academy of Comic Book
Arts. Subsequent Cons returned to El Cortez (where, Shaw observed,
“the swimming pool was clouded with fan-dispensed shark
repellant”), branching out into the downtown Community
Concourse for the exhibit. By the 1990s, the affair had grown to such
an extent that only San Diego’s monster Convention Center could
hold it.

The
1973 Comic-Con program booklet reviews the Con’s history and
names many of those responsible for the success of the previous
events. Shel is listed as “founder and coordinator”;
others whose names appear repeatedly are Krueger, Shaw, William
Lund, Richard Butner, Bill Schanes, and Mike Towry. And Barry
Alfonso, whose ad about buying comics in a
local circular in the fall of 1969 had attracted the attention of San
Diego’s newest comics fan, the recently arrived Shel Dorf, who
contacted Alfonso, who introduced Shel to Richard Alf. The three
started a club, the San Diego Society for Creative Fantasy, which was
the “group,” all teenagers except Dorf, that Shaw’s
group of fellow teenagers soon amalgamated with and began planning
the first Comic-Con, which, by the way, was officially entitled the
San Diego Golden State Comic-Con. Tom French eventually joined the regulars to coordinate the “dealer’s
room,” which, before too many years, had expanded into a
full-blown “exhibition” that demanded floorplans and
administration to keep track of space assigned and fees paid. The Con
was run entirely by unpaid volunteers for years, but as it grew, the
demand for a somewhat more committed staff grew, and by the late
1980s, Fae Desmond was
employed full-time as the Con’s first salaried manager. Other
paid staffers soon accumulated.

None
of this—and no names—are mentioned in the EW “history” of the Comic-Con.

I
met Shel in 1982. We were both attending Milton
Caniff’s 75th birthday party in Columbus, Ohio, at Ohio State University. Soon
thereafter, we worked together on a comic strip we hoped to get
syndicated: it was Shel’s brain child, and he called it Lines; he wrote it, and I drew it. Before we got started, though, Shel
thought we should discuss the terms of our partnership, and he wanted
Caniff as referee. At the time, Shel had been Caniff’s
lettering man on Steve Canyon for
several years. He arranged a conference call for the three of us. One
of Shel’s questions was about divvying up the plunder, if any.
I said, “Fifty-fifty—that way we’ll both think we
got the short end of the stick.” Caniff laughed his approval.
The strip didn’t sell, so the question was moot.

A
question about which there is no moot, however, is: Who is most
responsible for the existence of the San Diego Comic-Con? Shel would
be the first to say that creating and nurturing the Con wasn’t
a one-man enterprise: it took work by many people, of whom Shel was
only one. But we can arrive at the truest answer to the question by
asking it another way: Would the San Diego Comic–Con have come
into being without Shel? The answer, I believe, is, No. He brought
the idea of a comic convention with him from Detroit, where he’d
been instrumental in staging the nation’s first in Motor City.
In San Diego, he found a cadre of interested youths who were willing
to do the work, and Shel was happy to delegate. But year after year,
he was the sparkplug, stimulating interest in the Con among fans and
professionals alike, keeping the flame alive, until today—an
delirious annual conflagration at the water’s edge.

One
of Shel’s earliest cohorts, Mike Towry, who was publicity
chairman for the first Cons while 15 and 16 years old, wrote Shel in
2002: “It is impressive what the Con has evolved into, but it
has only had the chance to do so because it was founded upon your
true love of comics, their creators, and their fans, and because you
generously shepherded it through its critical early years at material
disadvantage to yourself.” Towry goes on to report that his
oldest son was a volunteer at the Con that year.

Shel
officially “retired” as “founder and coordinator”
of the Con in 1984, by which time attendance at the Con had reached
4,000. He has many pleasant memories of his years with the Con and
all that the association engendered. As Laura Embry wrote in a 2006
article in the San Diego Union Tribune: “The convention helped him get more work as an artist and a
writer and enhanced his reputation as a historian of comics. When
Warren Beatty turned Dick Tracy into a movie in 1990, Dorf was a consultant.” And if there was
a strip that captivated Shel more than Caniff’s Terry and Steve Canyon,
it was Gould’sDick
Tracy. “Dorf can remember as a kid
waiting on his front porch for the carrier to bring the day’s
paper so he could learn what had happened to the square-jawed
detective. He loved the stories, and he loved the artwork.”

One
of Shel’s memories he shared with me, a 1975 letter from
Superman’s co-creator, Joe Shuster,
who wrote Shel from his home in Forest Hills, Long Island, to express
his gratitude at receiving, the previous summer, the Inkpot Award,
the Con’s distinguished achievement trophy. Wrote Shuster: “It
is great to know that, after all these years, I am still
remembered—and that the original Superman art, the drawings
that I created, still hold fond memories for all the faithful fans. I
know that Jerry Siegel [who also got an Inkpot that summer] feels the same. ... Shel, I
believe you are doing a great service to all the comic book artists
and writers by granting them full recognition for their labor,
talent, and creative work. Due to your devotion and diligent efforts,
I am certain that future generations will have a much greater
appreciation of the work done by the pioneers of the comic book
world—and that the artists and writers who have contributed so
much to this field will now receive full credit for their
accomplishments.”

I’m
not sure that Shel has received full credit for his accomplishment as
“founder and coordinator” of the nation’s largest
comic convention. Entertainment Weekly doesn’t even know who Shel Dorf is. But we all do, and we’re
grateful. As Milton would say, Big Thanks, Shel.

*****

But
the size and success of the Comic-Con doesn’t mean comics have
arrived either, any more than the superhero covers of EW prove that comics are now widely appreciated
as an art form. The success of the Con is a tribute to movies money.
As EW’s cryptic
history of the event notes: “In the last decade, Comic-Con has
exploded into the most important pop culture event on Hollywood’s
calendar—a frenzied marketing free-for-all where, each July,
major studios and networks flaunt their coolest new projects, trying
to woo an audience of 125,000 sci-fi, fantasy, and horror fans.”
As Shel said, “Hollywood has kind of hijacked the Con.”
And comics fans are not what Hollywood is after. The number of comic
book booths in the mammoth Convention Center’s exhibit halls is
further testimony to the subversion of the Comic-Con to the power of
celluloid and money in a capitalist society. Mostly, the booths
display video games and motion picture tie-ins and toys derived from
the lot. Comics are a small delegation; and old comics, the tattered
and yellowed survivors of the Golden Age, are in even smaller supply.

The
guest list for the dozen years or so has included very few comic
strip cartooners. In Shel’s regime, they were there in
considerable numbers, their presence conjured up by Shel’s
insistent letters. These days, comic book artists and tv and movie
stars far outnumber the strippers. A few years ago, the National
Cartoonists Society began taking a display booth in the exhibit hall,
and NCS members, predominantly comic strip ’tooners, appeared
at a panel presentation together, discussing their craft. This year
for the first time in a decade or more several newspaper cartoonists
were among the Con’s guests: The Knight
Life’sKeith
Knight, Family Tree’sSigne Wilkinson,Mother Goose and Grimm’s Mike
Peters, who also does editorial cartoons for
the Dayton Daily News,
and fellow editoonist, San Diego Union
Tribune’sSteve
Breen, who does a comic strip called Grand
Avenue. Midway through the Con, a panel
discussion on political cartooning featured Wilkinson (who does
editorial cartoons for the Philadelphia Daily
News), Peters, Breen, and 2008 Pulitzer Prize
winner Michael Ramirez (Investor's
Business Daily), Bill
Schorr (United Feature), and "Mr. Fish" (LA Weekly/Village Voice) was
moderated by Daryl Cagle,
the cartoonist who also runs the Cagle.msnbc.com cartoon site and the
Cagle Cartoons syndicate.

MOTS
& QUOTES FROM GEORGE CARLIN

Bipartisan
usually means that a larger-than-usual deception is being carried
out.

Once
you leave the womb, conservatives don’t care about you until
you reach military age.

The
owners of this country know the truth: it’s called the American
Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.

Ever
wonder about people who spend $2 apiece on those little bottles of
Evian water? Try spelling Evian backward.

Environmentalists
changed the world “jungle” to “rainforest”
because no one would give them money to save a jungle.

In
this era of “maxi,” mega” and “meta,”
you know what we don’t have anymore? “Super-duper.”
I miss that.

Just
when I discovered the meaning of life, they changed it.

As
you swim the river of life, do the breast stroke. It helps to clear
the turds from your path.

By
and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth.

Think
of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are
stupider than that.

Elsewhere
(from John Nichols in the pages of The
Nation): Countering GeeDubya’s claim
that his “war on terror” was a battle for freedom, Carlin
asked: “Well, if crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters
fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight?” ... But Carlin’s
usual targets were the religious, governmental and economic elites.
“The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that
control things and make all the important decisions,” Carlin
once said. “Forget the politicians; they’re an
irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that
you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You
have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the
important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve
long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the
statehouses, the city halls. They’ve got the judges in their
back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they
control just about all of the news and information you hear. They’ve
got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year
lobbying—lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what
they want: they want more for themselves and less for everybody
else.” The pundits say there is no audience for the old-school
populism of a William Jennings Bryan or even a Franklin Roosevelt.
Carlin proved them wrong, preaching American radicalism with
punchlines every night before crowds that cheered (and laughed) as he
struck mighty blows against the empire.

PASSIN’
THROUGH

Creig
Flessel, 1912-2008

Creig
Flessel, a prolific illustrator active as a cartoonist and cover
artist at the birth of the American comic book, died July 17, five
days after suffering a stroke. He was 96 and lived in Mill Valley,
California. Flessel was the most accomplished artist working in
comics in the medium’s infancy. Many of the earliest comic book
illustrators were has-beens on their way down or wannabes not quite
good enough for prime time, but Flessel, at the age of 22, was
producing flawless illustrations for Street & Smith’s pulp
fiction, and at 23, he was doing stories and covers for Major Malcolm
Wheeler-Nicholson’s new line of comic books, destined,
eventually, to be DC Comics. Here’s the obit by Gary Klien at
the Marin Independent Journal in
California:

Flessel
lived at The Redwoods, a retirement community, where he moved in 2000
from his native Long Island, N.Y. Last fall, at a ceremony in Mill
Valley, Flessel was honored with the Sparky Award, named for the late Peanuts creator
Charles "Sparky" Schulz, who lived in Santa Rosa. The
award, inaugurated in 1998, is given to accomplished cartoonists in
the western United States, and its recipients have included Gary
Larson of The Far
Side,Will Eisner of The Spirit, Gus
Arriola of Gordo, and Sergio Aragones of Mad magazine. "Old
cartoonists never die, they just go to California and receive the
Sparky Award," Flessel joked at the ceremony. Flessel's work has
appeared in classic comic books from the 1930s and beyond; old
advertisements for companies such as Royal Crown Cola and Post Raisin
Bran; magazines as diverse as Boy's Life and Playboy; and the David
Crane comic strip. His work has also been
exhibited at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco. Even in
retirement, he contributed artwork to the monthly newsletter at The
Redwoods.

A
longer and more insightful appreciation appears at Tom Spurgeon’s
comicsreporter.com.

THE
FROTH ESTATEThe
Alleged News Institution

The
last hold-outs in the so-called news media have given up the
struggle. The three major weekly newsmagazines, Time,
Newsweek, and U.S.
News and World Report, have at last joined
the rest of their journalistical brethren as entertainers rather than
informers. Nothing sudden about it: the transformation has been going
on for years—with successive revampings of page design and
refocusing of emphasis and the like. The last of the innovations
before the wholesale conversion to divertissement can still be seen
in the opening pages of each magazine which are devoted to short
paragraph-long “articles,” amusing newsy squibs and bits
accompanied by photos and drawings, all premised on the conviction
that American readers, trained by commercials on tv, have the
attention span of May flies and can’t be bothered to read
anything more lengthy than a page. The laddie magazines are all built
on this principle, and the newsmags, seeing the proliferation of the
lads on the newsstands, decided, apparently, to go after the same
readership by developing a “department” of shreds and
patches. The maneuver, I confess, makes for interesting reading, fast
and funny. (Despite my pose as an above-it-all Olympian observer of
the American scene, I’m no better—and, I hope, no
worse—than the rest of us: I, too, look for entertainment amid
the news.) But the newsmags seem to have overlooked the basic
ingredient of the laddie mags—skimpily clad wimmin of the
embonpoint sort on the cover and in various full-page displays
within. That’s next, I suppose, but until that Rubicon is
crossed, the newsmags have decided to make themselves into more
diverting enterprises with cover stories that pose as “news”
under the subheading of “history.”

The
idea is that “history” informs the news of the day,
expands upon it, puts it in context, and so forth. Newsmagazines have
always done cover stories on trends and fads in our heppy heppy land,
but now they’re delving into unabashed history and, even,
literature. U.S. News led
the way in this endeavor: its covers over the last years have
increasingly brought our attention to some aspect of our history.
This year’s Fourth of July issue (dated July 7-14 but on the
stands several days earlier) featured “The American Revolution:
Myths and Realities,” with a cover picture of George
Washington. Fascinating stuff but “news”? Newsweek was the last to tumble: it’s “Summer Double Issue”
dated July 7-14 proclaimed itself “The (Mostly) Big Thoughts
Edition” with a cover portrait of Lincoln and Darwin. The cover
story of Time’s July
14 issue is about Mark Twain. All mightily engaging stuff, as I said,
but not the news of yesteryear. We apparently no longer want to know
the facts of the day’s events; we want, instead, to be
entertained with short forays into history. Let the revels begin.

And
while the festivities transpire, news expires. Mainstream news media
have apparently sidelined stories that might, in another era of
concerned journalism, have rated frontpage headlines, banners in
screaming red ink. Reporters in the trenches are still at work, but
what they report is often overlooked or ignored. Sharon Theimer at
the Associated Press, for instance, reported lately that “U.S.
exports to Iran—including brassieres, bull semen, cosmetics,
and possibly even weapons—grew more than tenfold during
President Bush’s years in office even as he accused Iran of
nuclear ambitions and helping terrorists. ... U.S. trade in a range
of goods survives on-again, off-again sanctions originally imposed
nearly three decades ago. ... Sanctions are intended in part to
frustrate Iran’s efforts to build its military, but the U.S.
government’s own figures show at least $148,000 worth of
unspecified weapons and other military gear were exported from the
U.S. to Iran during Bush’s time in office, [including] $106,635
in military rifles and $8,760 in rifle parts and accessories shipped
in 2004.”

And
while the political reporting on every hand keeps harping on John
McCain’s citing “the surg” as a sign of the success
of George W. (“Warlord”) Bush’s policy in Iraq—with
McCain’s accompanying ridicule of Barack Obama’s refusal
to recognize the success of “the surg”—no one is
reporting that the reason violence has subsided lately in northern
Iraq has very little to do with military might and everything to do
with the Almighty U.S. Dollar. The insurgents in Iraq’s Anbar
province have stopped disturbing the peace in order to continue to
collect the salaries the U.S. is paying them to stop shooting at us.
As I mentioned earlier, the diabolical success of the GeeDubya Scheme
is going unreported: first destroy the country’s economy in
order to make its citizens dependent upon the invader’s
largess, and then put all the natives on the payroll.

Footnit: A week or so after I wrote the first two paragraphs above, Brian
Kelly, editor of U.S. News, announced that the magazine is planning to convert to an
every-other-week publication schedule by 2009, claiming this will
permit more in-depth analysis, the justification he offers in
contemplating the cut-back in reporting straight news. “We
stopped chewing over last week’s events years ago,” he
says, deploying the disparaging verb of mastication as a way of
consigning to inferiority the news of daily events, “—in
order to give you more timely perspective and analysis,” he
concludes, invoking a clutch of status words that purport to give
important cultural standing to the magazine’s new scheme, which
is, really, not a journalist’s plan at all but an
entrepreneurial effort in the last ditch category to rescue the
75-year-old magazine from oblivion and death brought on by the
Internet and apathy among the rising generation of citizens who don’t
read, or buy, weekly newsmagazines or daily newspapers because they
don’t think “news” helps them through their daily
round of amusements and preoccupations. They should adopt Henry David
Thoreau as a patron saint: asked once why he didn’t read any
daily newspaper, the sage of Walden responded with insightful pith:
“I read one once and am acquainted with the principle.”

U.S.
News will presumably continue its web
presence, where its audience is “now more than 5 million people
a month,” Kelly drones on. To abandon sarcasm for the nonce,
Kelly and his magazine are attempting an end run around the Internet.
They are forced to accept the hard fact that 24/7 cable tv news and
the Internet can cover the news of the day with second-by-second
up-dates as necessary much better than a weekly magazine can. They
expect their website to continue to do the same, but they’re
reluctant to abandon print, which they see not only as “a
refuge from the din of the Web and cable tv” but as a way of
engaging people in the events of their lives in ways “uniquely
valuable.” And I hope they’re right.

EDITOONERYAfflicting
the Comfortable and Comforting the Afflicted

An
old one and a new one. Mike Keefe at the Denver Post has
established an enviable custom: he digs into his archives for old
cartoons that are still pertinent and uses them instead of drawing a
fresh cartoon. Here’s one he did before GeeDubya invaded
Iraq—in the fall of 2002 when George W. (“Whopper”)
Bush was still just talking about invading Saddam’s fiefdom.
Even Keefe, a mere cartooner, could see that little planning was
being done for what would come after the shooting. The new cartoon is Robert Ariail’s,
a particularly inventive visualization of the gasoline price crisis
and what to do about it.

T-SHIRT
INSCRIPTIONS

Constipated
people don’t give a crap.

I’d
agree with you, but then we’d both be wrong.

I
wonder if illiterate people get the full effect of alphabet soup?

I
know right from wrong—wrong is the fun one!

If
it weren’t for the gutter, my mind would be homeless.

You
look like I need another drink.

Impotence—nature’s
way of saying no hard feelings.

I’m
trying to see things from your point of view but I can’t stick
my head that far up my ass.

I
have a perfect body: it’s your vision that’s shot.

Where’s
the Rapture when you need it?

At
this rate, I have enough saved to retire for a year and a half.

Tell
me your sob story: I need a good laugh.

Honest
is the best policy, but insanity is a better defense.

With
enough practice, living in a moral vacuum feels petty darn good.

It’s
all geek to me.

Sign
on fencepost: No trespassing—violators will be shot. Survivors
will be shot again.

COMICS
PAGE WATCHThe
Bump and Grind of Daily Stripping

In Borgman/Scott’sZits, Jeremy has a new
girlfriend, who, with round head and large eyes, looks somewhat like
a fugitive from manga or the retro style of rendering. ... And in Candorville, Darrin
Bell’s take on Jesse Jackson’s
green-eyed assault on Obama is exactly right: an anonymous character
with a sack over his head (to preserve his anonymity) talks about the
misfortunes of his “friend,” saying: “My friend’s
leadership has made him the most important black man in America for
over 30 years, and now some punk-@%$ kid with big floppity ears comes
from nowhere and steals my—I mean, his—thunder.” He
gives his name as Smessie Smackson, as if we didn’t know. Bell
also did a four-day sequence in which George Carlin shows up in
Lemont’s dreams, concluding with the strip at the top of the
heap near here. ... And Glenn and Gary McCoy,The Flying McCoys, finally
ask the question that has been hovering in the backs of our minds,
now, for several years. What the heck was so all-fired sexy about
Queen Victoria anyhow? Surely not her underwear? ... Once again, the
punchline in Blondie has
Dagwood staring out at us. The gag seems obvious, comparing wild punk
hair styles with Dagwood’s, but it nonetheless comes as a
surprise because we’re so used to Dagwood’s akimbo
cowlicks that we don’t think of them as odd. Or, even,
fashionable. ... In Mort Walker’sBeetle Bailey, another
of those gags possible only in comic strips: Sarge’s hat has,
presumably, been hovering over his head for all of five minutes. ...
Poignant moments in Tom Batiuk’sFunky Winkerbean are
made possible by the nature of the comic strip medium. Lisa, ten
years after her death, is still high in Les’s consciousness,
high enough to materialize beside him on a bench in the park. And
Batiuk gets a nice gag out of it, too, on the second day.

Berk
Breathed’s Opus for July 6 didn’t make it into its syndicate’s flagship
newspaper: the Washington Post opted for a substitute, we learn at dailycartoonist.com, because,
according to columnist Gene Weingarten, “the editors felt it
might be insensitive to certain readers.” So the question
arises: which of those being mooned were, in the minds of Post editors, most likely to be offended? Exxon oil executives or Darth
Cheney or some Arab oil sheik?... And Mark
Tatulli poses a kindred pertinent question in
his Lio a week or so
prior to Opus’ indiscretion: how offensive is it to readers
when they are
the ones being mooned? ... At the bottom of the page, Snoopy with his
nose going flaccid. Sorry: couldn’t resist making that innocent
sight gag into an indecorous joke about sexual apparatus.

The
next week in Opus, the
hesitant penguin is awakened in the middle of the night by a corpulent
CEO, who is there, in Opus’ bedroom, apparently to be
“disciplined” by a scantily clad bimbo who enters the
room with a star-spangled paddle in her grip, and the CEO starts
undressing. I guess the Washington Post published this one: only fat CEOs or bimbos in their scanties would
be offended. ... In Scott Adams’ Dilbert, Dogbert
the Time Management Expert spouts this gem: “Never put time
into an activity that has no potential benefit,” he says, then,
looking at the pyramid-haired woman next to him, he continues: “For
example, why bother putting on makeup if you’re going to wear
that hideous outfit? That’s like knitting a sweater for a dead
squirrel.” Love the simile. ... In Darby
Conley’s Get Fuzzy, Bucky the cranky cat is “monkey-proofing” the apartment
by hanging a bucket of syrup over the door. Rob calls it a booby
trap, but Bucky corrects him, saying: “It’s really more
directed at the head area,” thereby turning an otherwise
innocent slang word into a less innocent one. ... In Terri
Libenson’s Pajama Diaries,
husband Rob has a vasectomy, just one more instance of Libenson’s
continuing forthright foray into marital sex. ... And Stephen
Pastis on Sunday, July 27, arranges an entire
sequence of exposition in Pearls before Swine in order to reach this terminating speech by
Pig, who has just interviewed Mr. Crumb: “Mr. Crumb’s
conundrum of the humdrum of being mum and eating plums like a numb
bum from some slum or drum and strum or hum with rum if dumb.”
Rat, after this disaster, tells S. Pastis: “You’re a
nausea-inducing embarrassment.” But Pastis, nonplused, says
merely: “Sick Tum? Come, have some gum.” Ouch.

Get
Your War On (GYWO), the popularity of which
is a stunning manifestation of the collapse of artistic integrity in
favor of sheer smart aleckry (the most trusted coin of the realm
these days), will soon be animated at 23/6.com, “a leading
comedic news site” according to a press release from Soft
Skulls Media (which is as good a name for this kind of media as I
could imagine). Emerging in the wake of 9/11, GYWO is an unabashed impersonation of a comic strip: it is manufactured by David Rees, who pastes
1980s-style clip art into a succession of panels and then gives the
depicted persons things to say. This comic strip imposter “became
a minor phenomenon” because of the comedic disparity between
the pictures and the words. The clip art depicts as blandly as
possible (because clip art, to be useful at all, must be universally applicable and therefore wholly inoffensive and nondescript) an
assortment of cookie-cutout white-collar workers who discuss current
events with unexpectedly blistering sarcasm and a surprisingly
foul-mouthed vocabulary. Most of the specimens I’ve seen are
funny with caustic satirical commentary.

Rees,
who must take the blame for this perversion of the art form, said:
“When 23/6 approached me about animating GYWO, I was skeptical they could do justice to my brilliance. However, they
assured me I wasn’t actually that brilliant. Ever since that
revelation, I’ve enjoyed breathing life into my beloved
clip-art characters. The [proposed] animations will be like Hobbes’
conception of life in the state of nature: ‘nasty, brutish and
short.’”

Brian
Spinks, director of video content for 23/6, thinks the website has
achieved a “real coup” in securing Rees’
cooperation. “His sensibility is a perfect fit for us,”
Spinks said, committing unwitting self-satire, “combining
informed outrage with a true sense of the absurd. And we’ll be
turning these videos around quickly, so they’ll have the
immediacy of a daily editorial cartoon but with the rich media
experience people are used to on tv and online.”

I’m
not sure how rich an experience the animated GYWO will induce. If the
animation is to be faithful to the original, it will doubtless
consist entirely of the sort of movement that is achieved by moving a
camera back and forth from close-up to mid-range and back, focused
all the time on the same static image, exactly what “happens”
in the example we’ve posted here—a fairly typical
instance. But, no. The animation for 23/6 will be something more
enlivened than mere changing camera distance: it will have “the
distinctive look of the work of Flat Black Film’s Bob Sabiston,
who brought rotoscoping to the Richard Linklater film, ‘Waking
Life.’ “Sabiston’s software lets animators trace
over live-action footage easily and quickly to create comics that are
amazingly life-like.” Rotoscoping is notorious among genuine
animators for the stilted motion it produces: rotoscoped movement
seems to take place in a dream. Or a nightmare. Or while waist-deep
in a pond of thick mud. So, it would seem that the “animated” GYWO
will begin by filming real people, then reducing their authentic
live-action motion to awkward wooden movement by tracing, or
imitating, that movement with hand-rendered lines.

Let
me see if I’ve got this right. A ringer of a comic strip the
pictorial element of which is made up of cut-outs of the most
innocuous and undistinguished drawings available without cost will be
given stilted movement by faking the animation with a rotoscope
thereby producing images that are, despite a herky-jerky motion,
“amazingly life-like” but not, actually, of living people
at all. A perfect crescendo of clip-art artistry—veritable
soap-opera symbolism, fake to fake to fake.

But
Rees sounds like an okay guy. I like his sense of humor even if I
detest and disparage the method he has chosen to display it. And his
satirical sensibility apparently springs from genuine human empathy:
the sale of two volumes reprinting GYWO has raised almost $100,000
for land mine removal in western Afghanistan. Nothing fake about
that.

Much
as I’ve enjoyed Tony Snow in his role as Presidential Press
Secretary—and admirable as he proved in
extremis and, judging from what others who
knew him well have said, in the everyday conduct of his life—I’m
not sure he rated the state funeral that a Presidential eulogy
created. Although he had been a working journalist at various times,
Snow was known chiefly as a conservative commentator, not as a
journalist in the same sense as Tim Russert or, say, Walter Cronkit.
And as Press Secretary, the role in which he truly shined—after
the wholly repressed Scott McCellan, Snow was purely irrepressible as
a pushback jousting target, great entertainment—he was a shill
for George W. (“Whopper”) Bush and Darth Cheney, a
mouthpiece: his job was to lie to the press and make them like it.
And he did that very well. He did it with good humor and enviable
panache. When he died, Fox News went apoplectic. Hours of eulogy and
remembrance—for a mouthpiece!!! If Russert hadn’t gotten
so much weepy press two weeks before, would the conservative
delegation have felt right about lauding Tony Snow so much? Nice guy,
no question, but a state funeral? What is left for the right wing to
do when Rush Limbaugh shakes free of this mortal coil?

DUTCH
CARTOONIST JAILED FOR INDECENT CARTOONS

One
morning last May, the Amsterdam constabulary showed up at the door of
the apartment of a “skinny cartoonist with a rude sense of
humor,” arrested him, and took him off to spend that night in
jail. The cartoonist’s crime was that he was suspected of
sketching offensive drawings of Muslims and other minorities and
posting them on his website, gregoriusnekschot.nl/blog (his only
venue: newspapers and magazines shun his work as too extreme; and the
website may not be fully functional these days, as the cartoonist
awaits his legal fate). Actually, the cartoonist, whose nom
de plume is Gregorius Nekschot (Dutch for
“shot in the neck”), did draw cartoons that might be
deemed offensive by various personages, and he takes considerable
pride in his work: “Harmless humor does not exist,” he
says, “—I like strong stuff.” What was at issue was
not whether he drew such drawings but whether they were, as alleged
by an Internet monitoring group, illegal under a Dutch law that
forbids discrimination on the basis of race, religion or sexual
orientation. The law was enacted, I gather, in the wake of Muslim
outrage over the Danish Dozen, twelve cartoons published in the fall
of 2005 by a Danish newspaper, one of whose editors, Flemming Rose,
initiated their publication in order to test the limits, or extent,
of freedom of expression in an emerging European climate of religious
intimidation by Islamic extremists who protest, sometimes violently,
any criticism of their religion. In Holland, a polemical filmmaker
named Theo van Gogh was murdered in November 2004 because he made an
anti-Islamic film. Elsewhere in Europe, a stage production and a
museum exhibit have been cancelled for fear of inciting the radical
elements of growing Muslim populations. In Denmark, the government
has been protecting the Danish cartoonists whose caricatures of
Muhammad brought destruction and death to the streets of Mideastern
cities in the winter of 2006. In Holland, however, the government has
apparently reacted to the intimidation by attempting to rein in
cartoonists and other creative people. “Denmark protects its
cartoonists; we arrest them,” said Geert Wilders, a populist
member of the Dutch Parliament famous for denouncing the Quran as an
Islamic version of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and, more recently, for releasing on the Internet a film, “Fitna,”
which continues his blasphemous crusade against Islam.

Under
suspicion since 2005, Nekschot, “a fan of ribald gags”
that often feature the Quran, crucifixion, sexual organs and goats,
may have been arrested in May as part of a government effort to
soothe Muslims angry about Wilders’ film. The authorities,
however, claim it simply took them three years to figure out the
cartoonist’s true identity and whereabouts. Nekschot was
released the next day and has yet to be charged; his arrest,
authorities now admit, was probably a “mistake.” It was
certainly a political and public relations gaffe of certifiable
magnitude, arousing public indignation throughout the country, which
“sees itself as a bastion of tolerance.” And then, adding
decibels to the furor, the Justice Minister, when grilled about the
Nekschot case, inadvertently revealed the existence of “a
previously secret bureaucratic body, called the Interdepartmental
Working Group on Cartoons,” which, officials hastened to
explain, had been established after the Danish Dozen crisis of 2006
to “alert Dutch officials to any risks the Netherlands might
face” but had no official censoring duties. Maybe not, but it
looks strangely like the thin edge of the censor’s wedge to me.

The
menace of the Nekschot case is reported in detail in the Wall
Street Journal in a July 12 posting, “Why
Islam Is Unfunny fo a Cartoonist,” by Andrew Higgins, who
writes: “How to handle Muslim sensitivities is one of Europe’s
most prickly issues. Islam is Europe’s fastest-growing
religion, with immigrants from Muslim lands often rejecting a drift
toward secularism in what used to be known as Christendom. ... The
contrasting Danish and Dutch responses ‘show that there is a
serious struggle of ideas going on for the future of Europe,’
says Flemming Rose. ... At stake, he says, is whether democracy
protects the right to offend or embraces religious taboos so that
‘citizens have a right not to be offended.’”
Everything in the foregoing report is taken from Higgins’,
occasionally verbatim.

AMERICAN
CARTOONIST JAILED FOR INDECENT CARTOONS

Beverly
Dwaine Tinsley’s training for a career in cartooning was
scarcely auspicious. Born in Richmond, Virginia, to a couple of
trailer-trash alcoholics on December 31, 1945, he was three months
old when he lost his father: the paterfamilias deserted his family
after catching the materfamilias in bed with another man. She
subsequently opened a beauty parlor and spent her evenings picking up
stray men in bars, taking her children, Dwaine and Donnie, two years
Dwaine’s senior, along because she didn’t know what else
to do with them. She married another alcoholic when Dwaine (he hated
the name Beverly) was nine. He spent much of his youth in the care of
his maternal grandparents, where he and his brother were dumped for
long stretches when his mother felt her amusements were too much
interfered with by the presence of her offspring. He was arrested
often as a juvenile and spent time in several reform schools. He
dropped out of high school at seventeen and, with a friend, moved to
Washington, D.C., where, during a couple of homeless years, he
supported himself and a drug habit “with odd jobs, petty
thefts, housebreaking, and being paid by men to allow them to orally
copulate him.” He was arrested in November 1965, and the
following March, he was convicted of burglary and sentenced to six
years in the Maryland state penitentiary. He got out in less than
four. During his incarceration, he survived 15 months in solitary,
read extensively, earned his GED, took a college course in sociology
by mail, and decided to become a cartoonist, a career he avidly
pursued upon release from prison.

He’d
doodled most of his life and later recognized that drawing had given
him a way to cope with the miseries of his daily existence. Dwaine
knew nothing about how to freelance cartoons to magazines, but
editors instructed him in the prescribed method: submit rough
drawings on 8.5x11-inch sheets and include a stamped, self-addressed
return envelope. Working a succession of menial jobs, he survived a
long apprenticeship without selling anything, but by 1974, his
cartoons were appearing in such magazines as Adam,
Chic, Penthouse, Playboy, and San
Francisco Ball. By then, he had married, on
June 20, 1969, a Richmond secretary named Charlotte Lambert, and
they’d produced a daughter, Veronica, who was born in October
the next year.

Late
in 1974, Tinsley sold his first cartoon to Larry Flynt’s
nefarious skin magazine, Hustler,
which, at the time, had been publishing for only two years out of
Columbus, Ohio. Flynt liked Tinsley’s work so much that he was
signed on as a “contract” cartoonist: he agreed to give
the magazine “first look” at any of his male-interest
(sex and alcohol) oriented cartoons, and Hustler,
in turn, guaranteed him two full-page color cartoons in every issue,
at $350 each. He could still submit to other magazines, except Hustler’s rivals, any cartoons Hustler rejected as well as cartoons on subjects Hustler wasn’t interested in. About 18 months later, Tinsley drove to
Columbus from his new domicile in Los Angeles, sleeping in his car en
route, to apply for a job. Flynt, impressed by Tinsley’s
foolhardy aspiration, hired him as cartoon editor. Tinsley accepted
the job and got married again. He’d divorced Charlotte in
February 1974, having taken up with Debbie Melhew, a pretty-faced
blonde weighing over 250 pounds, before they both moved to Los
Angeles, “the center of the adult world.” Tinsley hired
his new wife as his assistant and commenced a career that would be as
notable as his training had been ignominious.

In
the February 1976 issue of Hustler,
Tinsley introduced the world to Chester the Molester, “a
leering, overweight, blond fellow, dressed in saddle shoes and
herringbone slacks, who carried a baseball bat and craved
prepubescent girls.” For his debut, Chester had a hand puppet
on his pecker and was inviting a young girl to “give widdle
Rodney a kiss-kiss.”

Thirteen
years later, Tinsley, still Hustler’s cartoon editor and now the magazine’s most notorious
cartoonist, renowned for the unrelenting assaults his cartoons
committed on decent sensibilities, was arrested for sexually
violating his teenage daughter for the previous five years,
beginning, Veronica said, when she was about fourteen.

The
story of the subsequent trial is the chief focus of Bob
Levin’s latest book, Most
Outrageous: The Trials and Trespasses of Dwaine Tinsley and Chester
the Molester (216 6x9-inch pages, with photos
and some Chester cartoons, b/w; Fantagraphics paperback, $19.99),
which also rehearses Tinsley’s biography (from which I derived
all the details just recited) and supplies a short history of Flynt
and his magazine. In early January 1990, a jury of his so-called
peers found Tinsley guilty of five of the sixteen counts brought
against him, ignoring substantial inconsistencies and contradictory
allegations in Veronica’s version of the events of her life
with her father. (“Veronica” is not her real name, Levin
tells us early in the book; he has changed the names and biographical
backgrounds of most of Veronica’s relatives so long as the
alterations “do not impact upon the events of the story.”)
Tinsley, who insisted that he was innocent, was sentenced to six
years in prison, beginning in June 1990. But Tinsley appealed, and
his lawyer, Vanessa Place, supplied by a non-profit organization that
represented indigents, convinced the judges that Tinsley’s
trial had perpetrated a serious injustice. Tinsely’s conviction
was reversed in February 1992, and, a couple weeks later, he was
released.

Tinsley
returned to work as a contract cartoonist for Hustler,
and in late 1993, after he discovered Debbie was involved with
another man, he found Ellen Morgan, with whom he was soon living. He
married her in October 1995, one hour after his divorce from Debbie
was pronounced final. In February 1996, Flynt asked him to resume his
editorship at Hustler, and life, for the next four years, was good—even though Hustler was no longer quite as outspoken and provocative as it had once been.
Then in May 2000, at the age of 55, Tinsley died of cardiac arrest
suffered while lifting weights.

That’s
the story Levin tells. But that’s not the book he wrote. The
book he wrote is much more than Tinsley’s story. It is, first,
an indictment of American sexual mores fostered by cultural
counter-revolutionaries in the wake of the Reagan regime. The
prosecution had introduced as evidence against Tinsley 3,200 cartoons
from Hustler, the
implication being that a man who would draw or, as editor, accept
such cartoons for publication was so perverse that incest would be,
for him, a “natural” extension of his perversion. Levin
interviewed three of the jurors, one of whom, the minute Levin told
him what he was writing about, said: “Chester the Molester.”
Tinsley’s occupation didn’t affect the jurors’
feelings about him, but the pictures he drew did. If he could draw
cartoons about a child molester, “it would not have been
difficult on his part to go the next step”—which, in
those morally purified right-wing times meant only one thing,
apparently: the next step from drawing Chester the Molester was to
molest your own daughter. Obviously, Tinsley’s guilt was guilt
by association, one of the oldest and most fallacious of logical
aberrations. The society that tolerates this kind of thinking in its
halls of justice is a fallen society, badly in need of reformation.

The
case against Tinsley is an intellectually repulsive demonstration of
America’s prudish attitudes about sex, our national hysteria
about protecting “innocent children” from anything even
vaguely sexual, and our everlasting shame about our own morbid
obsessions with sexuality in all its manifestations. As Levin points
out, once in the grip of these delusional preoccupations, we are
incapable of seeing the rabid inconsistency inherent in believing
that Tinsley’s work could not be divorced from his character
and behavior but that the work of Stephen King, Alfred Hitchcock,
William Faulkner or Valdimir Nabokov [cf. Lolita] can be and usually is.

Levin’s
book is also a thoughtful consideration of the legal processes
involved in Tinsley’s case, courtroom procedures, briefs, etc.,
as well as a careful condemnation of the societal weaknesses revealed
in Tinsley’s fate. A workman’s comp lawyer when not
pondering the various deviant behaviors of outlaw cartoonists
(Levin’s first book was The Pirates and
the Mouse: Disney’s
War against the Counterculture, about Dan
O’Neill and his fight to preserve parody), Levin writes in the
lucid manner of a good attorney, presenting the facts. He also, like
the conscientious barrister we assume he is, discloses his biases
early in the book: Levin clearly hopes that Tinsley will prove to be
innocent of the charges against him.

“I
had hoped to reach a definitive conclusion about Dwaine’s guilt
or innocence,” he writes fairly early on. “To be honest,
I hoped to decide he had not molested Veronica. But with each step or
two I took in that direction, something goosed me in the opposite”
probably, he says, because of his training in the legal profession
and his experience in the judicial system. “The mainspring of
this system is the requirement that the advocates in these disputes
take opposite positions ... and fight for them with full force and
conviction—and then, theoretically, with their next client, be
able to take and fight for the reverse. Long participation in such a
system can make one less inclined to think of facts and conclusions
as entities sturdy and unshakable as Gibraltar but as more molten and
fluid. ... As a senior partner in a prestigious San Francisco firm
told me when I was starting out, ‘When you hear someone talk
about “truth,” you can be sure he is not an attorney.’
(This is not a state of mind totally confined to lawyers. To quote
Wright Morris, the National Book Award-winning novelist: ‘Whenever
you rely on human memory, you are writing fiction.’)”

When,
after reading the book, I wrote Levin to tell him how much I enjoyed
it and, with him, hoped for Tinsley’s innocence, Levin wrote
back: “I have suggested to some friends that after they finish
the book, we convene as a dozen of us and deliberate. I think it is
fair to say that if one can’t make up one’s mind, there
is reasonable doubt, so Tinsley would be ‘not guilty,’ if
not necessarily ‘innocent.’ As criminal defense attorneys
like to say, when asked how they can defend the guilty, ‘Guilt
is a legal concept, not a moral one. And no one is “guilty”
until a jury says he is.’”

Therefore,
in the book, Levin is unable to pronounce Tinsley “innocent”
of the crimes his daughter accused him of. And “Veronica”
is wholly unrepentant: Levin visited her and found her adamant that
her father had abused her, happy when he died. The reversal of the
decision that had sent the cartoonist to jail was based upon the
legalities of what constitutes a fair trial, not Tinsley’s
guilt or innocence.

When
Vanessa Place visited the courthouse and viewed the boxes of Hustler magazines that had been introduced as evidence against Tinsley, she
realized that it was highly unlikely that a juror “who had seen
them could view their creator with the presumption of innocence
[that] a fair trial required.” And the appellate court agreed,
saying: “The prosecution’s position seemed to be that
anyone depraved enough to have created these cartoons would be
depraved enough to sexually debase his daughter. But it was basic law
that evidence of a person’s character could not be used to
infer his likelihood to commit a crime.” The jury at his trial
had found him guilty of only a few of the charges brought against
him: in effect, they believed Veronica about three incidents but
didn’t believe her on nine others. One of the jurors Levin
interviewed explained this outrage to logic by saying that the jury,
initially unable to agree on a verdict, finally achieved a unanimous
opinion when it decided to compromise, to convict him of a few of the
charges. In the opinion of the appellate court, “The
inescapable conclusion was that the cartoons had so outraged the
jurors that they had decided he had to be guilty of something. ‘It
is reasonable to conclude,’ the court said, ‘that the
cartoon evidence tipped the scales of justice against appellant. ...
It is not reasonably probable that the same verdicts would have
resulted had the repugnant cartoons not been admitted.’”

But
the reason I bought and read Levin’s book is not because it
offers a course in judicial proprieties or because it provides an
object lesson of the criminality inherent in the sexual hang-ups of
bluenosed American morality. Or because it rehearses the biography of
an infamous cartoonist with a few insights into the so-called mental
life of his publisher. Levin is a resourceful and tireless researcher
and his muster of the facts is impressive. Any of these reasons are
perfectly sound motives for reading the book, but my reason is that
the book is written by Bob Levin. As in his other two Fantagraphics
titles, The Pirates and the Mouse and the later Outlaws, Rebels, Freethinkers
and Pirates, this book is, again, Levin on
the loose—his narrative mannerisms, his prose style, his
meanderings en route to a point. Reading a Levin book is another
writer’s guilty pleasure.

Reading
a Levin book is something akin to having a conversation with the
author. As Tom Spurgeon observed during an interview with Levin at
comicsreporter.com (April 27), one of the characters in a Levin book
is Bob Levin. Another is his wife Adele, who often furnishes a
telling insight into her husband’s ponderings. It is she who
may have explained the choice of the name “Veronica.”
Levin let Tinsley’s daughter choose her pseudonym, and when she
did, he speculated, for a moment, about “that whole Archie
Andrews/Riverdale scene. Cool, I thought. Irony. Then Adele reminded
me ‘Veronica’ was also the title of a song by Elvis
Costello that begins: ‘Is it all in that pretty little head of
yours? / What goes on in that place in the dark?’ Sometimes,”
Levin ends his book at exactly this point, “the world is too
weird,” a conclusion he deserves to reach, having undertaken
the Tinsley project because he had no idea what to do next to indulge
his penchant for writing about “off-beat”
cartoonists—which, to-date at the time, included “a
schizophrenic and an alcoholic and a speed freak and a suicide and a
misanthrope and one fellow whose career off-tracked when he became a
woman.”

Levin
described his writing process to Spurgeon: “I write
obsessively, sentence-by-sentence, word-by-word. ... Since I like
writing more than researching—and then revising more than first
drafts—I start writing as soon as I can. Then—thank God
for word processors—I layer stuff in as I collect it. As the
book makes clear, I couldn’t’ve ended the book as I did
without my final interview [with “Veronica”], and it
caused me to go back and tweak some of what had gone before.”

Although
he says he doesn’t like researching, he did plenty of it,
including microfilm of Ventura County and Los Angeles newspapers’
coverage of the case. “One thing I didn’t look at was
actual issues of Hustler. LFP
[Larry Flynt Publications] ignored my request to see its archives. I
couldn’t find a library that stocked them, and they were too
expensive to buy on-line. [A telling circumstance, surely.—RCH]
Anyway, I take an idiosyncratic, sort-of ‘ain’t’-randomness-grand’
view of research, and I thought, ‘This’ll be cool. Let’s
see if I can write this without reading one Hustler and if anyone’ll catch me.’”
Levin did read collections of Hustler cartoons, but in deliberately avoiding the magazine itself, he
displays exactly the sort of playfulness that often infects his work,
sprinkling fanciful turns of phrase throughout.

Spurgeon
quotes one of his favorites—something being “welcome as a
pack of syphilitic mandrills at the White House Easter Egg Roll.”
One of mine is the phrase “fertile crevice” in Levin’s
discussion of what constitutes admissible evidence about a person’s
character: “It is within this fertile crevice between relevancy
and prejudice that the question of character evidence thrives.”
Sometimes it’s not a phrase but an idea, turned this way and,
finally, that. In discussing the panting 1960s, for instance—the
period that failed to deliver on any of its promises except sex (as
Levin says)—he notes that “the permissive wave had swept
away resistance to premarital boffing and monogamic insistency”
and “enriched our language with ‘glory holes’ and
‘golden showers’ and ‘fist-fucking’
(brachioproctic eroticism), the first new act
of sexual gratification in eons” (my
italics). And then there’s this magnificent flight:

“Dwaine
had nurtured his wounds and resentments like a lioness her cubs. Each
rat cartoon (maybe), each shit cartoon (maybe), each crab-infested vagina and fetid douche, each degenerate Falwell
and demented Reagan, each big-cocked black and big-nosed Jew, each
severed limb and ravaged fetus (maybe, maybe,
maybe, maybe) was a blow against his
round-heeled mother (the TRAMP!!), his drain-the-dregs father (the
LUSH!!!), the regimented, narrow minded, madras-wrapped high school
squares, the bloody-fisted, no-necked, cracker prison guard cretins,
who had ganged up on him, shunted him, shamed him, clubbed him in
their combined totality into that solitary hole of hell, from which
he had emerged like some vengeful horror comic creature of the fens,
dripping, not gore or rotted flesh, but ink and Wite-Out, reconceived
and reconstituted by unknown gods of unknown motives for
unprecedented assaults, pursued with pride and courage, determined to
provide a meaning to his life beyond that mirrored in his childhood’s
latrine. He was saying, in effect, that there is value in the most
foul and repugnant, as there is value in me.”

But
the kicker is in the footnote: “The author apologizes for the
verbal liberties of the preceding few paragraphs, but he was reading Absalom, Absalom! at
the time of their composition; and Faulkner has that effect on
impressionable imaginations.”

Levin
is forever in the footnotes: it is there, at the bottom of the page,
that we find his mind unwinding and unraveling, speculating and
postulating, inviting us in to witness furtive asides and errant
apostrophes, perhaps to gain a glimmer of some other manifestation
that the narrative rattling along above has called to mind, his
mind—and, invariably among such bottom feeders as us, ours. The
pleasure in reading Levin is not by any means limited to the
footnotes: they merely smear icing all over the cake, making the
treat a licky-finger delight. In the text above the footnotes, we
might find a short dissertation on the history of societies’
prohibition against incest, into which Levin laces his own sometimes
sarcastic interpretation: “For the anti-porn crusader Andrea
Dworkin, incest was how girls were acculturated to their future role
in society.”

For
Tinsley, Levin argues, Chester the Molester was “a ludicrous
sexual outlaw” in pursuit of “anything with an orifice.”
Chester was a parody of sexuality, and in that, both Tinsley and
Levin find the redeeming utility of the cartoons. “There is
humor in these cartoons,” Levin writes, “—and it is
humor with a social value. Dwaine would defend Chester on the grounds
that he focused attention on a major societal problem or that he
satirized the consequences of uncontrolled sexual desires, but I
believe the value of these cartoons is both deeper and more subtle.”
The humor in Tinsley’s cartoons incited outrage, thereby
fulfilling “one of the nobler—and more
courageous—functions of art,” namely, to probe societies
for tender points. “If it causes discomfort, those areas may
benefit from open airings. What are you hiding, the artist asks. Why
are you hiding it? Would you care to discuss it?” Then the
insinuating lawyerly footnote: “The argument against this
position is that certain expressions are so repugnant to a society’s
core beliefs, values, customs, and traditions that they cannot be
permitted lest they destroy all that binds that society together. The
counter-argument to this position is that its implementation did not work out so well for Nazi
Germany and Soviet Russia.”

Levin
brings in Tony Hendra, author of a book examining post-WWII “black
or sick humor,” Going Too Far, which seems to maintain that “the purpose of satiric art is the
challenging of social norms.” Then Levin quotes Tinsley: “As
a cartoonist, I’m going to make you laugh or make you mad or
make you think. ... Hustler cartoons allow people to laugh at the taboo, the sacred and the
controversial. ... Most people laugh at our cartoons, feel guilty
about laughing, and end up thinking about it for years—that’s
impact!”

Later,
Levin quotes Place, saying her analysis “may be the first—and
most astute—criticism of Dwaine’s work ever written:
‘Appellant skewers sacred cows. He attacks what he sees as
hypocritical social mores, religious pretense, racial sensitivities,
and sexual peccadilloes. He chronicles the ludicrous machinations in
which man will engage to satisfy his sexual desires, and the breadth
of those desires. More fundamentally, [he] rips the cloak of civility
from private habits and practices, confronting man with the absurd
humiliation of his most primitive functions, and mocks that
humiliation, exposing as false the pride that causes us to blanch.
[His] drawings celebrate the disgusting and embrace the repugnant,
reveling in the uncomfortable fact that man is, after all, only
human.’”

Tinsley,
Levin, and Place are right: all three interpretations are doubtless
accurate—at least in retrospect. My guess, however, is that
Chester evolved in a somewhat different, albeit related, way. Before
Chester arrived, Tinsley was already doing cartoons that assaulted
the hypocrisies of his society, hypocrisies that Tinsley’s life
had amply illustrated, at least as far as he himself was concerned.
But I think Chester was born in the steamy hothouse of the Hustler headquarters. Once there, surrounded by the extreme gaucheries of
Flynt’s editorial attitudes, Tinsley was, I believe, tempted to
out-gross everything else in the magazine, photos of bimbos in
gynecological throes, their hands at their crotches, spreading their
labia, as well as other pictures, cartoons with less instructional
purpose but nonetheless fairly disgusting if not also depraved.
(Unlike Levin, I studied a few issues of Hustler back in my misspent youth when I was freelancing cartoons to
magazines. Girlie magazines bought my wares more readily than
“general interest” magazines, so I soon specialized and
examined the market I seemed destined to frequent. I never sold to Hustler, but I did to
the magazine’s more decorous sister publication, the
short-lived Chic.) Chester, waving his pecker like a banner, was result. What could be
grosser?

And
Tinsley realized, too, that the noisome tastelessness of his Chester
cartoons blended with the over-all crude ribaldry of the rest of the
cartoons as well as with the generally scabrous tenor of the
surrounding photos and the minimal albeit often vulgar text of the
occasional articles. It’s as if he was saying: Okay, you want
to display vulvas? —lemme show you something really vulgar,
something so colossally indecent, so majestically offensive, that it
transcends any question of taste and civilized sensibility. Almost at
once, being a cartoonist for whom hypocrisy was comedic opportunity,
Tinsley could see that the brutish assault of his Chester cartoons
also satirized a national sexual ethic of such massive repression as
to constitute a deranged obsession. Such satire, he learned, is so
combustible that it is as dangerous to its perpetrator as it is
menacing for its target. Satire, it seems, is an unwieldy weapon, a
sword that cuts two ways, its essential irony opening itself to
interpretations so exactly contradictory as to be self-destructive.
And that brings us to—

THE
QUESTION OF SATIRE

The
brouhaha began almost before the July 21 issue of The
New Yorker had safely escaped the printing
press the week before the cover date. Explosion. Outrage and ire on
every hand. When asked about the provocation of his drawing on the
cover, cartoonist Barry Blitt sputtered: “Outcry? The magazine just came out ten minutes ago,
at least give me a few days to decide whether to regret it or not."
The picture Blitt had drawn depicted the post-election victorious
Obamas, Barack and his wife Michelle, doing what a Fox News
commentator termed a "terrorist fist bump" in the Oval
Office, Barack in Muslim attire and an afro-topped Michelle in
camouflage fatigues and combat boots with an AK-47 strapped on her
back. In the fireplace, an American flag is merrily going up in
flames while, in a portrait over the mantlepiece, Osama Bin Laden
smiles. This effort is satirically entitled “The Politics of Fear,”
but the title, as usual with The New Yorker, appears at the bottom of the contents page inside the magazine, not
on the cover, where the image is expected to stand alone, making a
statement solely in visual terms. The statement, unhappily, enraged
many who witnessed it.

Chief
among those were Obama supporters, leading off with Obama campaign
spokesman Bill Burton, who said: “The New Yorker may think, as
one of their staff explained to us, that their cover is a satirical
lampoon of the caricature Senator Obama's right-wing critics have
tried to create, but most readers will see it as tasteless and
offensive. And we agree." So did the John McCain campaign in the
person of its spokesman, Tucker Bonds, who also called the cover
"tasteless and offensive."

On
the Web and on cable-tv, continued the Associated Press report, the
chattering classes were in full froth. The left-leaning
HuffingtonPost fumed: "Anyone who's tried to paint Obama as a
Muslim, anyone who's tried to portray Michelle as angry or a secret
revolutionary out to get Whitey, anyone who has questioned their
patriotism—well, here's your image."

“It’s
the mass media at its worst,” said Darrell West, an elections
and public opinion expert at the Brookings Institute, quoted in USAToday on Tuesday,
July 15, the second day of the conflagration. “It perpetuates
false information, and it’s highly inflammatory. It gives
credibility to what’s been circulating for months, and that’s
what makes it dangerous.” The image seemed to confirm various
falsehoods circulating among the populace. According to a recent Newsweek poll,
reported USAToday’s Jill Lawrence, “26% of Americans believe Obama was raised a
Muslim, 39% said he attended an Islamic school, and 12% said he was
sworn in to the Senate on a Quran. None of that is true.” But
many of the unwashed persist in believing it, and for them, Blitt’s
cover was gospel, revealed Truth, not satire.

The
AP story quoted from a statement issued by the magazine on Monday,
saying the cover "combines a number of fantastical images about
the Obamas and shows them for the obvious distortions they are. The
burning flag, the nationalist-radical and Islamic outfits, the
fist-bump, the portrait on the wall? All of them echo one attack or
another. Satire is part of what we do, and it is meant to bring
things out into the open, to hold up a mirror to prejudice, the
hateful, and the absurd. And that's the spirit of this cover.”
I’m not so sure. I don’t know how the depictions are
revealed, simply by being there, as distortions. They are that, of
course, but nothing in the drawing itself portends that
interpretation. And that, as many observers noted, is the problem.

An
editoonist, joining in the fray on the AAEC-List (Association of
American Editorial Cartoonists) argued that the cover was stupid because it was
poorly drawn. “Doesn't look like satire—looks like a
proclamation. The message is a good one, the problem is Americans
just don't understand satire anymore (or else they just don't condone
it), and unless it's crystal clear that it's a joke, then they just
take the image as gospel.” Others on the List applauded this
verdict, saying the magazine was simply inept at political satire.

A
Pultizer winning political cartooner, Nick
Anderson, past president of AAEC who cartoons
for the Houston Chronicle,
told Alexander Burns at Politico: “As a piece of satire, it utterly fails. It offered no context,
other than the ‘The New Yorker’ title above it. It merely
portrayed a haphazard menagerie of the paranoid myths and stereotypes
about the Obamas that are being circulated on the Internet, without
knocking them down. That’s pretty weak satire.” He added
that it would have been more effective if it had included the title,
“The Politics of Fear,” on the cover. That, however, is
not The New Yorker style, which aims for subtlety, the extreme sort that can be mined by
sneaking the title onto an interior page, practically out of sight.

“Satire
doesn’t run with subtitles,” explained David Remnick, the
magazine’s editor. “A satirical cartoon would not be any
good if it came with a set of instructions.” Admirable
phrasing, but most cartoons, even in The New
Yorker, come with captions or some verbal
accouterment: that’s what makes them cartoons.

The
cover cartoon would have been stronger, Anderson said, “had
they shown an enemy of Obama painting the picture, or imagining it in
their head.” Maybe it would have helped if both he and his wife
were shown wearing flag lapel pins.

Trey
Ellis at HuffintonPost sought a remedy in more context for Blitt’s
jab. “I consider myself a satirist,” Ellis said, “and
I get the intended joke, but dressing up perhaps the next president
of the United States as the new millennium equivalent of Adolf Hitler
is just gross and dumb. Imagine instead almost the same cover but in
the corner some right-wing icon like Limbaugh, Cheney or O'Reilly,
via some thought bubbles, imagining the Obamas like that. At least
then the offensive absurdity of the point of view would be
inescapable and we would all be allowed to laugh at it. Or better
yet, picture a middle-aged married couple watching the Obamas on tv
and the husband imagining them as the terrorists so depicted, while
the wife seeing them as the reincarnation of JFK and Jackie O. That
would, I think, nicely illustrate the point of the cover, the extreme
visions many in this nation have around the probable future first
couple. Anything would have been better than what they did.”

Also
at HuffingtonPost, Rachel Sklar said the image “combines every
smeary right-wing stereotype imaginable.” The
New Yorker, she goes on, may think it’s
“satirizing the use of scare tactics and misinformation to
derail Obama’s campaign,” but, “What’s that
they say about repeating a rumor?” Just as appearances become
reality by persistence, rumor becomes fact by repetition. Sklar
e-mailed Blitt for a response to those who feel that his work was
offensive, and to explain his own personal feelings about the Obamas.
Said Blitt: “I think the idea that the Obamas are branded as
unpatriotic [let alone as terrorists] in certain sectors is
preposterous. It seemed to me that depicting the concept would show
it as the fear-mongering ridiculousness that it is.” Sklar
managed to snag what she called an “exclusive interview”
with Remnick, which she began by asking why he ran the cartoon.

The New Yorker
Explains

“Obviously
I wouldn't have run a cover just to get attention,” Remnick
said, “I ran the cover because I thought it had something to
say. What I think it does is hold up a mirror to the prejudice and
dark imaginings about Barack Obama's—both Obamas' —past,
and their politics. I can't speak for anyone else's interpretations,
all I can say is that it combines a number of images that have been
propagated, not by everyone on the right but by some, about Obama's
supposed ‘lack of patriotism’ or his being ‘soft on
terrorism’ or the idiotic notion that somehow Michelle Obama is
the second coming of the Weathermen or most violent Black Panthers,
that somehow all this is going to come to the Oval Office. The idea
that we would publish a cover saying these things literally, I think,
is just not in the vocabulary of what we do and who we are... We've
run many many satirical political covers. Ask the Bush administration
how many.

“It
always occurs to you that things will be misinterpreted or taken out
of context,” he continued, “—that's not unusual.
But I think that's the case of all political satire, whether it's Art
Spiegelman or Thomas Nast or Herb Block or Jon Stewart. I bet there
are people who watch Stephen Colbert and think he's a conservative
commentator, or maybe they did at first. ... A lot of people when
they first saw Colbert said, ‘What is this?’
What he was doing was turning things on [their] head.

“About
five weeks ago,” Remnick went on, “we were about two
hours from running a cover of Obama in a Brooklyn Dodger's uniform,
sliding into home. And his number was 42. And anyone with even a
little bit of knowledge of baseball history knows this is Jackie
Robinson. So this was kind of a turn on Obama being the Jackie
Robinson of American politics—in a way—and no doubt
people on the Obama campaign would not have found it offensive—they
would have immediately understood what we were trying to say, that
Obama had jumped an enormous historical barrier. The only reason I
yanked it was because it turned out someone had already done this,
used this image on some political baseball cards. So I unfortunately
held back that really good image. That was saying a particular thing
at a particular time. This is saying a particular thing at a
particular time, when these imaginings and dark fantasies and
misconceptions about Obama exist. And we're putting it all together
in one image and holding a mirror up to it and showing it for it for
the absurdity that it is.”

Obama
supporters and liberals aren’t the only people expressing
unhappiness with Blitt’s cover. Some conservatives, Lawrence
reports, “said the cover annoyed them because they were its
real targets. ‘The cartoon is intended to make fun of
conservatives as ignorant racists, and essentially marginalize as
moronic any criticism of Obama,’ said Philip Klein at The
American Spectator.

The
problem, said Elaine Miller, a student of gender and race in
political cartoons, is that “once you launch a work of art, it
belongs to the reader. The artist’s intent is very interesting,
but the reader owns the interpretation.”

Interpretations

The
interpretations were many and, as the saying goes, varied. Untallied
numbers of ordinary citizens were angry, many saying they couldn’t
believe The New Yorker would “go there.” But not everyone who ranted about the
cover was sympathetic to the liberal point-of-view. At Politico.com,
one correspondent said, “Is he Muslim? Barack Obama has refused
to answer questions about his conversion from Islam. What is he
hiding?” Another one wrote: “No one was offended by the
cartoon until Obama was offended”—but Obama never said he
was offended. In fact, when first asked for a response to it, he
hadn’t seen the cover and when he heard a description of it, he
“shrugged incredulously” according to Politico’s
Mike Allen, and said, “I have no response to that.”
Still, the notion that the Obama campaign officials and the candidate
are one and the same prompted another letter writer to say: “Obama’s
reaction makes me suspicious. Had he laughed it off, no problem; but
his reaction makes me feel like he is trying to cover up something
... that he really is what the picture portrays. Scary!”

Even
scarier was this epistle: “Obama is technically Arab-American
and not Afro-American since the official minority definition says a
person must be 12% black to be Afro-American. Obama is only 6%
African-Black. Through his dad, he is 44% African-Arab, so that makes
Obama Arab-American. Since he is Arab-American, that makes the cover
appropriate. Since the Obamas are also linked to the Weathermen
leader, that makes the garb on Michelle Obama totally appropriate.
The fact that Hamas openly endorses Obama tells us everything we need
to know. Obama quite frankly scares me, and in the early days, I
admired him, but as the truth about Obama surfaced, I switched to
Hillary. And since she is now not running, I will pick the best of
the two left running, which is McCain. At these important times,
Obama would be a mistake. He’s a great orator and speaker, but
that is about it for his skill level—simply not enough
experience to take the office of the President of the United States
in these troubled times.”

All
of which seems to validate the Obama campaign’s fears about how
people might interpret the drawing. And before we plunge ahead, let
me pause a moment to adjust our sights by the light of facts rather
than the notions let loose by some of the foregoing. First, Obama
never was Muslim so he couldn’t convert. Second, the former
Weatherman who lives in the same Chicago neighborhood as the Obamas
is not a leader of the group. In fact, he’s a college professor
who’s written a book denouncing the Weathermen and the violence
they represented. As for the Hamas endorsement, yes, that occurred,
after a fashion. Ahmed Yousef, chief political advisor to the Prime
Minister of Hamas, said: “We like Mr. Obama and we hope he will
win the election.” During the same interview that produced the
“endorsement,” Yousef was asked what he thought of
Obama’s condemnation of Jimmy Carter’s visit with Hamas,
but he didn’t seem troubled by it, according to the online
report I consulted. In any case, you be able to tell a lot about
someone by the friends he keeps, but you can’t tell much by the
unsolicited endorsements he gets.

Another
letter-writer at Politico produced this monument to logic: “It
is astonishing how few Obama supporters have the sophistication to
understand the level of satire in this cartoon. It just goes to show
that they are overwhelmed with their leader, and he is overwhelmed
with himself. Neither Obama nor his supporters have the ability to
think critically. Again, Obama, the rookie, lacks what it takes in
sophistication, intelligence, and wisdom to successfully perform the
duties expected of a President of the United States of America. As
such, the people find him unelectable. How unfortunate that Obama and
his supporters were taken by a cartoon! Satire adding to satire
adding to satire.”

This
correspondent is presumably a registered voter. Fear for the fate of
the Republic yet?

Comic
book artist Paul Pope, recording his reaction at Tom Spurgeon’s
comicsreporter.com, saw Blitt’s cover as a “parody of the
right-wing view of Obama as the conservative’s Worst Nightmare,
a hodgepodge of every leftist-radical Islamist cliche orbiting the
heads of the conservatives.” But he wasn’t sure everyone
would get it. Some, he speculated, might see the cover image as
somehow reflecting “a right-ward shift of editorial policy”
in the magazine.

But
not everyone thought the cover was all that awful. John McQuaid at
HuffingtonPost on the day after the story broke, thought there was
“an absurd decorousness in the denunciations” of The
New Yorker for displaying “poor taste”
in the context of a political campaign. Said he: “Magazines and
other journalistic enterprises would be crazy to buy into the notion
that the arbitrary etiquette of American campaigns (which encourages
candidates to lie baldly, and surrogates to spin and smarm and
swift-boat, while prohibiting frank talk to a host of issues from
race to religion to terror itself) should govern their decisions.
Underneath that are liberals' more practical fears about the cover's
impact on Obama's campaign. This line of thinking goes: Obama is so
new and different, his image so unformed in the public mind, and U.S.
opinion still so anxious on the matter of terrorism, with Democrats
perceived as weak—that the Obama campaign, and we as a nation,
just can't handle images like this, because they might be interpreted
the wrong way. ... When liberals start policing the ‘poor
taste’ of cartoons so that some people don't get the ‘wrong
idea,’” McQuaid concludes, “it only reinforces the
notion that all the fear-mongering was effective, and perhaps
right—and also shows how weak and tenuous Democrats fear their
position on terrorism remains.”

Noting
that political cartoons have always ridiculed politicians and others
among the powerful and famous, an editorial in the Chicago
Tribune said there was “an inspired
twist to this latest cartoon contretemps. The
New Yorker cartoon isn't satirizing Obama.
It's taking aim at people who are frightened by Obama, those who are
willing to believe even the most outlandish Internet-fueled rumors
about the candidate. The New Yorker's having wicked fun with the absurd notion that America is one election
away from installing a Muslim quisling as the leader of the free
world, along with his terrorist wannabe wife. This Baracknophobia
(thanks to humorist Jon Stewart of "The Daily Show") is so
preposterous, so ludicrous, so demonstrably untrue that it makes
perfect fodder for a cartoon, and more. For those coming of political
age with the influence of the Internet, here's one thought that the
cartoon inspires: Saying something on tv—or blogging it—is
not the same thing as proving it. It doesn't take much for scurrilous
rumors about a candidate to get started. And with the Internet they
can be halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on,
to paraphrase a proverb. One way to fight back is with the truth,
which the Obama campaign is doing at its anti-smear Web site,
fightthesmears.com. Another way is with a ferocious parody, like The
New Yorker's. Remember, political humor is
always going to offend somebody.”

Tim
Rutten at the Los Angeles Times thought the cover was “smart political satire.” Said he:
“Anyone with an ounce of wit and a passing acquaintance with
what's been going on during this presidential campaign will recognize
Blitt's illustration as a compendium of the various false and
defamatory allegations about the Obamas that have been spread across
the Internet.” Rutten may have too much faith in the general
population’s powers of discernment, but he might be right when
he worries about “our division into blinkered red and blue
camps [having] drained humor's salutary bite from our politics. Or
perhaps it's that Blitt and Remnick are up against another, more
subtle problem. The New Yorker is one of the last great American publications in which the long
tradition of politically and socially conscious cartooning persists
with any vigor. One U.S. newspaper after another has used
cost-cutting as an excuse to drop its political cartoonists.
Nowadays, few newspapers even bother to run political cartoons on a
regular basis. As a result, when it comes to political comment and
satire, we're becoming a nation of visual illiterates. Moreover,”
Rutten concludes, “for all their practiced outrage, neither
political camp really objects to this sort of controversy. Every news
cycle dominated by what are essentially ephemera—like The
New Yorker cover—is another 24 hours in
which Obama and McCain have been spared questions about real issues.
Insults are so much easier to deal with than issues.”

Issues
like whether unfettered business interests ought to be free to wreck
the economy in pursuit of profit or should be subject to some
governmental regulation to rein in rampant greed; or if we can
restore the Constitutional system of checks and balances in order to
prevent future Presidents from assuming dictatorial powers; or how we
can ameliorate the energy crisis somewhat by introducing and
enforcing a 55 mph speed limit nationwide and demanding that auto
manufacturers produce cars that get more miles from a tank of gas; or
how we can remove monied interests from controlling elections and
government. All important issues, I ween, but all requiring greater
political courage than I can see on the horizon. Instead of focusing
on such matters as these, the so-called news media persists in
blathering on, endlessly (or, at least, for several “news
cycles”), about trivia. Rutten notes that according to the Pew
Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, “nearly
a quarter (23%) of all the print and broadcast coverage devoted to
the presidential campaign during a particular seven-day period went
to just two stories— Jesse Jackson's sotto voce affront to
Obama (13%) and McCain economic advisor Phil Gramm's insensitive
remark about the recession being all in people's heads (10%).”
Rutten concludes, glumly: “Maybe we're not so much a humorless
or overly sensitive people as we are a trivial one.”

Cartoonists Weigh In

Cartoonists
weren’t any more unified in their opinions about Blitt’s
cartoon than any other group of commentators. Art
Spiegelman, whose 1993 New
Yorker cover showing a Hassidic Jewish man
and a black woman kissing incited hysterical ire, said the Obama
cover isn't "anything other than a necessary inoculation and
vaccination against what has been traveling below the surface and
needs to be stared at right before the eye.” He thought Blitt’s
picture might destroy the stereotypes it was ostensibly attacking.
“It seems to me,” he said, “that showing the
fevered image directly will be a possible way of looking at and
dissipating that image. I think, as a result, it’s a fairly
brave thing to do.” Brave, maybe; foolhardy, more like.

Stephen
Hess, co-author of Drawn and Quartered: The
History of American Political Cartoons, sees
flaws in the cover cartoon, but he thinks it accomplished its goal by
being controversial. It is “absolutely” offensive, he
said, but “that’s what makes it a good cartoon. If it
makes people argue and think about something, in our society, that’s
good. It does what a cartoon should do.”

David
Horsey at the Seattle
Post-Intelligencer and a two-time Pulitzer
winner, did a cartoon in reaction to the furor over the Blitt cover. He
imagined what sort of cover the conservative National
Review might publish that would do for McCain
what the liberal-leaning New Yorker did
for Obama. By echoing Blitt’s Obama tableau with a similar
depiction of McCain’s alleged flaws as a potential President,
Horsey intended to reveal that the Obamas portrait was just as false.
The satire turned on the expectation that McCain supporters would be
just as offended by Horsey’s cartoon as Obama’s
supporters were by Blitt’s—and for kindred reasons. The
only difficulty is that Horsey’s McCain cartoon deals in actual
issues with the McCains “while the terrorist Michelle and
Barrack joke attempted by Blitt was dealing with wild and baseless
lies,” observed fellow editoonist Matt
Wuerker.

Yes,
I know, responded Horsey. “There really is no perfect analogy
between the wild things being said about the Obamas and the stuff
being thrown at the McCains. I realized that before I even drew my
cartoon. Still, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to
attempt something close to it and see how people reacted. Well, the
reaction has been pretty big. My cartoon ended up on ABC and Fox and
various web sites, including the HuffingtonPost. Traffic to my site
spiked way above anything else in my newspaper for the day. None of
this tells me anything about the worth of the cartoon, only that, if
I want to become a web site click whore, all I have to do is latch
onto some controversy and push it along with my own wild image. The
clicks will follow.”

Wuerker,
in the same spirit of jovial jousting, replied: “I’ve
authored my share of bad analogies. I didn’t mean to come off
as above it all or as the analogy police. I was just trying to make a
point about how upside down all this stuff is getting. I mean, we
started out with an image that was supposed to be an absurdist spoof
of the misconstruction of caricatures of Obama (misinterpreted by
most) that have now spawned misconstructions of the caricature of
McCain that cleverly allude (in twisted ways) to the first
misunderstood attempt at satire. Which all reminds me of my favorite
saying: today if you’re not confused, you’re just not
thinking clearly.”

Vanity
Fair, in what it described as “a
selfless act of solidarity” with their friendly rival
“downstairs here at the Conde Nast building,” produced a
McCain cover mock-up along the same lines as Horsey’s, but
their artist, Tim Bower, imitated
Blitt’s style with precision; visit vanityfair.com for July 22
and look for “Politics and Power: Vanity Fair Covers The New
Yorker.” And at the political cartoon site, cagle.msnbc.com,
Daryl Cagle has assembled a flotilla of cartoons under the heading
“New Yorker Obama Cover.”

At
his blog, Horsey discussed some actual issues that reactions to The
New Yorker cover seemed to jostle into
visibility: “Barack Obama was on Larry King's CNN show telling
what he thought about the satirical New Yorker cover cartoon that pictured him as an Osama-loving Muslim in the
White House: ‘Well, I know it was The
New Yorker's attempt at satire. I don't think
they were entirely successful with it. But you know what, it's a
cartoon, Larry, and that's why we've got the First Amendment. And I
think the American people are probably spending a little more time
worrying about what's happening with the banking system and the
housing market, and what's happening in Iraq and Afghanistan, than a
cartoon. So I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about it.’
Obama was his usual calm and rational self and even went out on a
limb to suggest that being called a Muslim in America should not be
considered pejorative: ‘You know, there are wonderful Muslim
Americans all across the country who are doing wonderful things. And
for this to be used as sort of an insult or to raise suspicions about
me I think is unfortunate. And it's not what America is all about.’
Of course, the jingoistic people who are fearful of all Muslims and
spread paranoid fables about Obama are exactly the folks The
New Yorker cartoon meant to satirize. Obama
thinks the joke not only failed, but made life a little tougher for
him. Nevertheless, the cartoon brought the issue to the fore and got
the candidate time on CNN to reiterate that he is a Christian, that
he was not raised in a Muslim home and that he pledges allegiance to
the Stars and Stripes. In the end, the artist may have achieved his
goal: Put the slanders of Obama squarely in front of Americans and
let them be discussed in the open, not in the dark corners of
cyberspace.”

A
day earlier, Horsey had blogged on another aspect of the subject
under the heading: “Can Barack Obama Take A Joke?” Here’s
what he said:

“My
biggest complaint is not that The New Yorker went too far with the cover cartoon of Barack Obama as a Muslim, but
that the people running presidential campaigns have no sense of
humor. Admittedly, I have a rather skewed view of the world after
devoting most of my life to insulting the sensibilities of half my
readers day in and day out, but I had no problem understanding that
the now-notorious cartoon was a dig at all the right wing nutballs
and conspiracy cranks who have been spreading slander about Obama
through the gutters of the blogosphere. ... I got the joke and
recognized the intended target. I don't think the drawing was racist,
I don't think it was too subtle, and I don't think it will influence
anyone to vote against Obama who wasn't already voting against him
anyway. Obviously, not everyone agrees with me, including plenty of
people I like and admire—such as my sweet wife and several of
my cartoonist colleagues. Maybe I've pushed the edge too many times
myself to appreciate their sincere negative response to the cartoon.
And maybe I've enjoyed the controversy a little too much, having
joined the fray by drawing a cartoon that imagined similar treatment
being given to John McCain by the conservative National
Review.

“At
least part of my motivation for partaking in this mud wrestling
match,” Horsey continued, “is that I didn't really
believe either the Obama campaign or the McCain campaign when they
issued statements calling The New Yorker cover ‘tasteless and offensive.’ That's boilerplate—the
same kind of fake outrage that all the candidates have been
displaying during this election year. It seems as if the Obama
campaign and Hillary Clinton's campaign spent the whole winter and
spring seizing on mildly rude comments from people in the other camp,
feigning outrage and demanding apologies and firings. Part of this is
because the media has pounced on every tiny gaffe and turned each one
into a 24-hour news story. Everybody's been appalled about something
and no one has had the good sense to say, ‘lighten up.’
You can see the effect with John McCain. Here's a guy who still has
the attitude of the wild-living, cocky fighter pilot he used to be.
That is actually the most appealing thing about him. It is why the
press has always liked him and why rides on the Straight Talk Express
were the hot ticket on the campaign trail. McCain has a hard time
answering a question without first making a sarcastic or funny
remark. But, now, he's censoring himself, biting his tongue and
getting as solemn and cautious as his opponent.

“And
how about that opponent? Does Barack ever tell a joke? He may be the
second coming of JFK, but he sure lacks the Kennedy wit. If I had
been him, I would have grabbed the opportunity afforded by The
New Yorker cover and I would have said,
‘Yeah, that's a great cartoon. It shows just how ridiculous all
these rumors are. The fact is, when I get into the White House, I'll
have a portrait of Abraham Lincoln above the mantle and the only
thing I'll be burning in the fireplace will be transcripts of Rush
Limbaugh's radio programs.’ Couldn't somebody on the Obama
campaign figure this out? Any sissy can complain about being picked
on. A leader can take a joke—and turn it to his advantage.”

All
of which, I heartily agree with. Ditto what Wuerker wrote: “You'd
think everyone would get the joke, but this attempt at arch ironic
humor by the uber satirists at The New Yorker appears to have gone astray. Instead of causing knowing snickers and
guffaws, the lampoon seems to have misfired, and angered many on all
sides. The Obama campaign condemned it. ... Even the McCain campaign
called the cartoon ‘tasteless and offensive.’ Are the
campaigns betraying a lack of good humor about all this? In the
cultural context of ‘Lil' Bush’and the nightly hammering
politicos take on tv programs like ‘The Daily Show’ and
‘The Colbert Report,’ is there a double standard here
about how much fun the satirists can have with Obama? Is the Obama
campaign too thin-skinned? Barry Blitt, the cartoonist who created
the image, was sure it was unmistakable satire. ... Monday, the
magazine issued a statement and said the cover ‘combines a
number of fantastical images about the Obamas and shows them for the
obvious distortions they are.’”

Wuerker
continued: “Ted Rall,
president elect of the AAEC thinks the Obama camp is handling the
joke in the wrong way; ‘The Obama campaign—just coming
off another Sister Souljah-ing, this time of comedian Bernie Mac—is
rapidly surpassing the Taliban as icons of humorlessness. The intent
behind Blitt's cartoon seems unmistakable, but even if some twits
don't get the (months old) joke, the last thing the butt of said joke
should do is come out against it.’

“Ann
Telnaes, a pulitzer prize winning cartoonist
now doing animations for WashingtonPost.com agrees and alludes to
some other misunderstood satire involving Danish cartoons: ‘There
will always be someone offended somewhere. People should save their
outrage for what will happen afterwards; the inevitable calls for
reining in so-called offensive cartoons.’

“Does
this cartoon episode reveal a brittle aspect of the Obama campaign?
The comedy kitchen out here in media land gets pretty hot. Is it
possible that it's too hot for Obama and he can’t take a joke?
Or maybe this is an example of a badly failed attempt at humor that
not just misses the funny bone but inadvertently feeds malicious
rumors. Nick Anderson thinks so: ‘As a piece of satire, it
utterly fails. Satire should be controversial because of the point
it's making, not due to misinterpretation. All satire is subject to
some misinterpretation, but this particular piece is open to far too
much.’

“One
of history's most famous satirical pieces, ‘A Modest Proposal’
by Jonathan Swift, was so over the top in it's suggestion that the
children of the poor in Ireland be eaten by the rich that an educated
reader understood it as poignant satire. I think The
New Yorker cover falls far short of its
stated goal. The artist and The New Yorker editor have claimed that it is so over the
top that it is clearly absurd. But it's not sufficiently over the
top. It is merely depicting what the whisper campaigns have been
suggesting. If they wanted to depict it as patently absurd, I think
they failed. That failure can have unintended consequences. In the
light of the malicious ‘he's a secret Muslim’ smear that
continues to circulate (a recent Newsweek poll showed that 26% of Americans believe Obama was raised as a
Muslim), the Obama campaign may be justified in it's aggressive
pushback. The conservative website WorldNetDaily ran an internet poll
on The New Yorker cover
asking people's reaction to the cartoon. The most common response
(60%) agreed with the statement; ‘The image isn't too far from
the dangerous truth about the Obama family.’ The next largest
response agreed with: ‘Funny, because there's some truth in
it.’ In the era of Internet misinformation, irony has become a
minefield. One misstep and things can really blow up.

“With
a good number of voters getting most of their news from Comedy
Central's ‘Daily Show,’ perhaps the new media landscape
has become so confusing that the difference between fact and satire
is badly blurred in the public mind. A perfectly good joke can get
muddled and misconstrued. An attempt at satire can end up smelling
more of Swiftboats than of Jonathan Swift, even when offered up by
the likes of the comic geniuses at The New
Yorker.”

Jonathan
Swift’s famed satire is more than usually a
propos here: unlike the Bliss cover, Swift’s
satire benefitted from having a visible title that warned of the
satire to follow: “A Modest Proposal: For Preventing the
Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their
Parents or Country and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick.”
Under that heading, when Swift suggested that the impoverished Irish
could alleviate their poverty by selling their children (always
numerous in a poor community) to be eaten by the wealthy, he could be
misunderstood but he’d reduced the possibility somewhat. And by
the time we get to this gem—“A young healthy child well
nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome
food, whether stewed, roasted, baked or boiled, and I make no doubt
that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout”—the
raw absurdity of his proposition reveals the satire. Swift, an
Irishman, was scarcely promoting Irish babies as gourmet dishes: he
was attacking the indifference of wealthy British landlords who owned
much of Ireland. In Swift’s view, their indifference to their
fellow beings in Ireland was so colossal that they could be imagined
as dining on Irish infants. Figuratively speaking, that’s
precisely what they were doing, living high on the rent they
collected while the renters starved to death.

At
comicsreporter.com on July 15, Tom Spurgeon thought Blitt’s
intent is perfectly clear: “The general satirical point being
made seems to me pretty clear unless you have an agenda or are too
stupid to breathe or are willing to be stupid as far as politics go
or are mad at the cartoon and want to see it in a certain light or
are just really sensitive or fake-sensitive on these issues. Besides,
no artist should have to take into account other people's stupidity
or agendas when making whatever point they wish to make.”

In
a unusual spasm of egalitarian sentiment, New
Yorker editor Remnick agreed. At npr.org (and
on the air), he said: “The kind of e-mail I get is telling me,
‘I get it. But I don’t think so-and-so is going to get
it, I don’t think so-and-so in West Virginia or out there in
the Middle West.’ That, to me, is a false argument. If you can
get it, why can’t other people get it? I don’t think that
this notion that only Upper West Side Manhattan elitists get satire
is the case at all.”

Roger
Simon at Politico.com is also against what he calls “the
Idiot’s Veto.” On July 16, he explored the notion that
“sophisticated readers of The New Yorker will understand that the cover is satire,” but many others
“will take the cover seriously and believe that the Obamas
revere Osama bin Laden, hate the American flag, carry assault rifles
and are dangerous Islamic radicals. And, the argument goes, The
New Yorker should not have run the cover for
that reason. But this is what is called the Idiot’s Veto: if a
single person might not get a joke, then you should not tell the
joke. All humor (and everything else) should be reduced to the lowest
common denominator just to make sure nobody misunderstands anything.
This,” he continues, “would remove a lot of the humor
from life. Shows like ‘The Daily Show with Jon Stewart’
and ‘The Colbert Report,’ both of which are almost pure
satire [that is, satire by means of untrammeled irony], would have to
go off the air. And the late-night comics would have to shut up. And
many writers would have to stop writing. All in order to have an
idiot-proof society. Even if this were possible,” Simon
concludes, “would it be worth it?”

Remnick,
quoted in the New York Times in a July 15 article asking why Obama isn’t the butt of jokes
with late-night comedians, sees the Blitt cover as being well in the
same spirit as Stephen Colbert’s highly ironic comedy: by
exaggerating, he mocks something, thereby showing its absurdity.
“That’s what satire is all about,” said Remnick.
Quoted at npr.org, Remnick believes that perhaps the chief reason the
cover has incited so much controversy is that so many voters are
dissatisfied with this country’s political course and have
invested much of their hope in Obama.

The
late-night stand-ups, by the way, all agree that Obama has escaped
being the butt of their jokes because their audiences seem to be
favorably disposed towards Obama and therefore not likely to laugh at
him. Moreover, nothing Obama has done yet has defined him in comedy
terms—nothing that would inspire jokes “like Bill
Clinton’s womanizing, GeeDuby’s goofy bumbling, or Al
Gore’s robotic persona,” reported the Times’ Bill Carter. “The thing is, he’s not buffooonish in any
way,” said Mike Barry, who’s been writing jokes about
Presidents for late-night comedians since the days of LBJ, most
recently for David Letterman. And then there’s the issue of
race: no comedian will risk making a joke about Obama’s race
for fear of being seen as racist. Black comedians have no difficulty
telling jokes about Obama’s race, but most of the major network
late-night comedy is engineered by white comics for white audiences.
Bill Maher’s turf, HBO, gives him a little more license in this
regard. “There’s been a question about whether Obama’s
black enough,” Maher said. “I have this joke. What does
he have to do? Dunk? He bowled a 37. To me, that’s black
enough.”

It
may not be safe, however, to think that the American populace can
perfectly grasp satire. It may have been H.L. Mencken who claimed it
was impossible to overestimate the ignorance of the common man, but
regardless of the source of the remark, even Spurgeon seems to agree.
“While it's shameful to think this election may feel the impact
of people out there thinking Senator Obama is a secret Muslim, or
masking their distaste for the candidate through something like a
summary judgment as to his supposedly arrogant demeanor, it was also
incredibly stupid that the 2004 Democrat primaries turned on one guy
screaming funny at the end of a rousing campaign speech.”

For
this reason, editorial cartoonists learned long ago that unless they
are very careful, their cartoons will be misinterpreted to mean
exactly the opposite of the cartoonist’s intention. Nick
Anderson argues that cartoonists have a responsibility not just to be
provocative but to be clear. “There is a constant and natural
tension in the creation of satire,” he told Burns at Politico.
“The delicate art of satire is suffocated by heavy-handed
elucidation. But if the satirist fails to make the point clearly
enough, the whole enterprise backfires in unintended
misinterpretation.” Exactly the case with Blitt’s cover.

The Heavy Thinkers
Cogitate

“Of
course it’s satire,” said Robert Koehler at
HuffingtonPost on July 24, “—as editor David Remnick has
been forced to explain a few times since the issue whacked America in
the face. I also saw the problem with it. Satire normally creates
acute discomfort for those it is targeting, but this cover managed to
wound only those who had already been wounded.” Calling the
cover “reckless satire,” Koehler goes on to quote Lee
Siegel’s July 20 article in the New York
Times to prove that the cover “isn’t
actually satire at all: ‘In satire,’ Siegel wrote,
‘absurdity achieves its rationality through moral
perspective—or it remains simply incoherent or malign
absurdity.’ The moral perspective of The
New Yorker cover,” Koehler continues, “was
revealed in its assigned title, ‘The Politics of Fear,’
but the title was buried at the bottom of the table of contents on
page 2—fiendishly understated, you might say. ‘An
analogous instance,’ Koehler continues quoting Siegel, ‘would
have been a cartoon without commentary appearing in a liberal
Northern newspaper in the 1920s ... that showed a black man raping a
white woman while eating a watermelon. The effect of accurately
reproducing such a ridiculous image that dwelled unridiculously in
the minds of some people would have been merely to broaden its
vicious reach. The adherents of that image would have gone
unsatirized and untouched.’ For further examples of this kind
of non-satire,” Koehler says, “download the preserved
covers of Der Sturmer, Julius Streicher's 1920s-era Nazi propaganda rag, and imagine a New
Yorker cover of, for example, a worm in a
sliced-open apple with the face of a stereotypical (hook-nosed)
Jewish male, and the caption, ‘When something is rotten, the
Jew is the cause.’ Revealing, two pages later, that the title
of the drawing is ‘The Politics of Hate’ would not, I
dare say, reverse such a cover's psychological impact.”

Siegel,
whose most recent book is Against the Machine:
Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob, begins his diatribe against the Blitt cover by saying, “Let’s
talk about the bloody crossroads where satire goes searching for its
target.” After noting that many people doubt whether the cover
is satirical at all, Siegel agrees: “For satire has always
taken as its target conventions, sentiments and injustices that are
universally recognizable and complacently accepted, and not at all
hidden phenomena that have to be roughly revealed. The reporter is
the one who exposes social rottenness operating in secret. The
satirist deposes it once it has become a visible and established part
of life. ... If you accept this definition of satire, then the reason The New Yorker’s
cover seems to have fallen short is precisely that it brought out
into open, respectable space an idea of the Obamas that is still,
happily, considered contemptible. The portrait of them as secret
Muslims, in cahoots with terrorists and harboring virulent
anti-American sentiments, exists for the most part either on the
lunatic fringe or in what some might call the lunatic establishment:
radically partisan entities like Fox News. If, on the other hand,
this newspaper began politely referring to Senator Obama’s
radical Islamic sympathies, then a full-blown exaggeration of that
insinuation into ridiculous satire would be just what the doctor
ordered.”

Siegel
continues: “In satire, absurdity is the only rationality.
Overstatement is truth. Contrary to what some critics have said, The
New Yorker cartoon did not lack for
ridiculousness. The idea of Michelle Obama with an AK-47 slung over
her shoulder is ridiculous. An Obama-inhabited Oval Office with a
portrait of bin Laden hanging over an American flag burning in the
fireplace is patently absurd. The problem is that the cartoon
accurately portrays a ridiculous real-life caricature that exists as
literal fact in the minds of some people, and it portrays it in terms
that are absolutely true to that caricature. An analogous instance
would have been a cartoon without commentary appearing in a liberal
Northern newspaper in the 1920s [and he describes the
watermelon-eating rapist cartoon, which, if published like Blitt’s,
would have had the effect of broadening the notion’s “vicious
reach,” leaving its believers “unsatirized and
untouched].

“In
satire,” Siegel proceeds, “absurdity achieves its
rationality through moral perspective—or it remains simply
incoherent or malign absurdity. The New Yorker represented the right-wing caricature of the Obamas while making the
fatal error of not also caricaturing the right wing. It is as though
Daumier had drawn figures besotted by stupidity and disfigured by
genetic deficiencies—what might have been a corrupt
19th-century politician’s image of his victims—rather
than the corrupt politicians themselves, whom he of course portrayed
as swollen to ridiculous physical proportions by mendacity and greed.
But if that very same New Yorker cover had been drawn in a balloon over the head of a deranged
citizen—or a ruthless political operative—it would have
appeared as plausible only in the mind of that person. The image
would have come across as absurd and unjust—a version of
reality exaggerated to the point of madness.” In other words,
as satire.

Siegel
concludes: “By presenting a mad or contemptible partisan
sentiment as a mainstream one, by accurately reproducing it and by
neglecting to position the target of a slur— the Obamas—in
relation to the producers of the slur, The New
Yorker seems to have unwittingly reiterated
the misconception it meant to lampoon. No wonder so much political
humor nowadays contents itself with the smug deriding of the worst
aspects of the ‘other side.’ At a time when it is almost
impossible to attach a universal meaning to anything, the crossroads
linking satire to its target can be very hard to find.”

An Illuminating Object
Lesson

Cartoonist Ruben Bolling, who
produced in April an installment of his Tom
the Dancing Bug along the same satirical
lines as The New Yorker cover, sympathizes with Blitt and Remnick.

Is it that Obama is a
crazy leftist who has Muslim leanings, so wouldn't it be ‘funny’
if he ended up a terrorist President? Or is it that people believe Obama is a crazy leftist who has Muslim leanings, so isn't it ‘funny’
to mock their misplaced apprehensions by showing how absurd their
fears are? Because my comic is obviously longer and the premise is
more developed, I could make it clear (or relatively clear) that I'm
mocking people's misplaced fears about Obama, not Obama
himself. My comic shows explanations for Obama's nature and behavior
that are clearly ridiculous, making fun of the paranoid, delusional
explanations that are actually floating around out there: Barack
Hussein Obama is clearly not a ‘typical’ American name
that would be perfect for a Muslim Manchurian Candidate. The people
supporting him are clearly not [very well] disguised at young white
idealists. But it's actually less clear what the satirical intent of The New Yorker cartoon
is. It just shows an America-hating, terrorist President Obama. Of
course, I'm certain Blitt intended to make fun of people's paranoid
perceptions of Obama, not how leftist/radical/Muslim Obama is. But
that's because I've seen his cartoons before, and because I know what
could or couldn't be the stance of The New
Yorker. But if this same cartoon were created
by Sean Delonas and published by The New York
Post, I'd think it was satirizing Obama
himself, and that's a very different (opposite) point: it would be
tasteless and offensive.”

Bolling
concludes: “A cartoon shouldn't rely on the context of its
creator and publisher in order to successfully make its point. Some
more indicators should have been utilized in the cartoon in order to
make the target of its satire clearer. I was able to do that in my
comic because I had eight panels and many, many words. (And there are
those who would argue that I'm not someone who should be arguing that
comics should have more words. ...)”

In
a succession of panels, Bolling has provided his strip with a moral
perspective (in Siegel’s term) by creating an obvious context,
not leaving it off-camera for the viewer to imagine as Blitt did, and
then by exaggeration, Bolling reveals the absurdity of the
proposition he is attacking. Thus, the Truth of his cartoon lies in
its overstatement. But satire is not always easy to discern amid the
bells and whistles of its customary accompaniments.

Definitions

Satire,
in common parlance, means “ridicule of human vice or folly.”
More precisely, as the American Heritage
Dictionary has it, satire is “a literary work in which irony, derision, or wit in any
form is used to expose folly or wickedness.” The methods by
which satire achieves its objective, according to C. Hugh Holman’s Handbook to Literature, include irony, burlesque, parody, sarcasm,
invective, and innuendo. Of these, irony and sarcasm are
the most difficult to deploy without risking misunderstanding. Sarcasm is “a
form of irony, Holman
says, “in which, under the guise of praise, a caustic and
bitter expression of strong and personal disapproval is given.”
In his book The Humor of Humor, Evan Esar says sarcasm is “a verbal sneer compounded of ridicule and contempt.”
Sarcasm is often used to deflate the pretensions of bores, Esar goes
on, giving, as an example, the case of a husband who was attempting
to impress his neighbors with his knowledge of income tax and related
problems in high finance. After listening patiently for some time,
his wife said: “I think it’s wonderful, John, how a man
who earns so little money as you do should know so much about it.”
Compared to irony, sarcasm is easy to detect because it is much more heavy-handed.

Holman
says “irony is
likely to be confused with sarcasm but it differs in that it is usually lighter, less harsh.” The
difficulty in recognizing irony resides in the device’s
fundamental deceptive mechanism: “verbal irony is a figure of speech,” Holman explains, “in which the
actual intent is expressed in words that carry the opposite meaning.”
Says Esar: “The most frequent form of irony is the expression
by which a person says the opposite of what he means, and the
listener or reader believes the opposite of what is said.” In a
perfect transaction, Esar goes on, irony “generally occurs when he who reads black thinks white and he
who writes black means white.” In its simplest form, irony is
present in the nicknames we give childhood friends—“the
slow boy is Speedy, and the fat boy is Skinny.”

Blitt’s New Yorker cover is
ironic satire. To apprehend and appreciate ironic satire, we must
realize what is not overtly expressed. Most readers of The
New Yorker know that the stories circulating
about the Obamas are wildly false, so for them, the irony at the
heart of Blitt’s picture makes it satirical. But for many
others, not the sophisticated readers of the magazine but more like
the letter-writers at Politico whom I quoted earlier, the cover by
depicting those rumors reinforces them and gives them authenticity.
Or, at least that’s what the Obama campaign thought—hence
their alarm. And their alarm is not entirely misbegotten. As Jonathan
Alter at Newsweek.com observes, “negative images burn their way
into the consciousness of voters in ways that cannot be erased by
facts.” The cartoon image of the Obamas in the White House may
have intended to target “dopey Internet rumor mongering,”
but it is just as likely to perpetuate the fictions it is meant to
jeer out of existence. Hence, the problem, the question, in satire:
how, in an ironic form of presentation, to make the opposite, but
true, unexpressed and invisible Truth of the cartoon understood. No
easy assignment.

Experienced
political cartoonists have usually been singed enough by the
incendiary rage of misapprehending readers that they are aware of the
dangerous duplicity in satire that is ironically expressed. And a
good editor can help: a good editor can explain to the editoonist how
one of his cartoons can be misinterpreted. Blitt, who doesn’t
produce work on a daily basis, may not be as aware of the pitfalls of
irony as the average editorial cartoonist. And Blitt is more
illustrator than cartoonist; some of his other New
Yorker covers can be seen at http://www.newyorker.com/online/covers/slideshow_blittcovers, where a
slide show is in progress. (Some of the cover comedy is fairly
uncomplicated, even ordinary; one or two, however, seem nearly as
obscure in their meaning as the Obama effort.) Finally, Remnick,
aiming for the bemused detachment of The New
Yorker’s traditional sophistication,
may assume a complementary blase worldly wisdom in his magazine’s
readers instead of imagining a bumptious capacity for misapprehension
as a newspaper editor does in his readers—all of us, the
general hoi-polloi not to mention political campaign operatives,
crouched at the ready in their bunkers of instant response and
refutation.

A
modicum of irony infects Tinsley’s Chester the Molester
cartoons, too, although the series belongs most obviously in the
burlesque category of satire that achieves its objective by
exaggerating to the point of absurdity. Blitt’s Obama cover
also dips into burlesque: Blitt has taken a proposition inherent in
the false rumors about the Obamas as far as it can be taken in order
to demonstrate how absurd it is, but the essential irony inherent in
satire has subverted his agenda. As we ponder how the best laid plans
oft go awry in an ironic universe, we may wonder about the target of
Chester’s alleged satire. Given the motive that I think
preceded Tinsley’s satiric intention—namely, to out-gross Hustler’s content and thereby to provoke an uproarious gawfaw at the sheer
crudeness of the cartoons—it’s likely that, in the
narrowest sense, the perhaps unintended target of the satire is the
sort of person who buys Hustler and drools over its gynecological photography; in the broader sense,
as I’ve already said, the target is doubtless an entire nation
obsessed with sex.

Before
we leave the subject of gross-out satire, here’s a batch of
tasteless cartoons that came floating my way over the Internet,
arriving just in time to serve as the final exam. What are the
satiric targets of these?

HOAXED

That’s
what happens when a noun turns into verb and bites you on the ass.
And I’m chagrined to report that’s exactly what happened
to yrs trly, that dear sweet boy we all know and love. It all began
with my quoting last time in Opus 226 Ernie
Bushmiller’s letter to existentialist
Samuel Beckett, who, it was alleged, wanted to write gags for Nancy. Then Dave Astor at Editor & Publisher picked up the story and mentioned it in his online Syndicate World.
Then came Tom Spurgeon at comicsreporter.com with this, his
suspicions about the authenticity of the Bushmiller-Beckett business,
quickly confirmed by Others In The Know:

“This
sounds too good to be true, but Editor &
Publisher has a short piece up on RC Harvey’s
unearthing a period of correspondence between Samuel Beckett and
Ernie Bushmiller. 11:49 ET: James Sturm just wrote in to agree with me and suggests it may have
something to do with a Bob Sikoryak fictional piece built along those
lines. Anyone out there know more? NOON ET: Ben Towle writes: ‘This supposed
correspondence between Beckett and Bushmiller— if it's from an
article supposedly written by A.S. Hamrah and published in Hermenaut magazine no. 15 [it is—RCH] —has been floating around for
years, and was, I believe, concocted by Paul Karasik. It was ages
ago, but I seem to remember meeting him maybe at SPX and his
admitting to having written it (I'm not 100 percent on this, as this
would have occurred at the bar post-show, after many drinks, and many
years ago). It's a pretty hilarious piece of writing, and done so
well that it could easily be mistaken for legitimate... but I'm
pretty stunned that RC Harvey and/or Editor
and Publisher have taken it as legitimate,
particularly since the illustrations are clearly credited to R.
Sikoryak.’ 12:07 ET: Dan Nadel confirms. 12:34 ET: Both Bob and Paul just wrote in to clear up that A.S. Hamrah wrote
the story, not Paul.”

There
it is. I’ve been well and thoroughly snookered by Scott Hamrah,
who I’d never heard of until I chanced upon his phoney article.
I’d apologize to Dave Astor if I’d deliberately attempted
to mislead him; but I didn’t. I was merely an innocent
bystander until I was hit by the passing buffalo. At first, as I
contemplated confessing my culpa in this adventure, I thought a hoax might be a form of satirical
irony, and this embarrassing episode would thus graduate to serve as
a suitable (if ironic—and therefore all the more a propos)
capstone to the preceding edifice exploring Satire and Its Pitfalls.
But, no, a hoax has no such redeeming social value. To quote from
William Walsh’s 1892 Handy-book of
Literary Curiosities: “A hoax may be
defined as a successful effort to deceive without any motive but
fun.” And why am I quoting from such an antique tome as
Walsh’s? Because I went burrowing into it, hoping to find that
somehow, back in the dawn of time, a hoax started out being related
to irony. Irony, after all, is a mask of the actual target of the
satirist’s crusade, so it involves a species of deception and,
I thought, might be akin to a hoax. No such luck. The word probably
originated, Walsh speculates, as a corruption of hocus-pocus, “which in its turn is a corruption from
the hoc est corpus of
the Mass.” A hoax is a deliberate deception, no more, no
less—outright fraud but with a prankster’s motive not a
thief’s.

Cringing
in shame, I asked myself how I could have known—how I could
have detected the deception and avoided falling into Hamrah’s
sly trap. Thinking I had missed some obvious clue to a shenanigan in
progress—something I should have recognized at the time I first
read Hamrah’s article— I looked up all the key elements
on the Internet—the name of the journal, the article’s
author. And I found them. Judging from what I found, they are both
genuine, authentic entities. Nothing about either, even had I
researched them before, tipped me off to a fraud lurking in the
shadows. I looked up R. Sikoryak, who is credited with providing the Nancy strip
illustrations for Hamrah’s article. No help. While I learned
that Sikoryak is expert at mimicking the drawing styles of various
cartoonists and artists, that fact alone would not have clued me to
the deception being perpetrated: I would have supposed (and did, in
fact) that Sikoryak had produced the Nancy strips at the behest of Hamrah (which was, I suppose, exactly the
case) to illustrate what the Bushmiller-Beckett correspondence in the
absence of any actual Bushmiller art. Hamrah’s article was
published in 1999, and the letters were written, supposedly, in the
early 1950s; by the time of Hamrah’s publication, then, I could
easily suppose (as I did) that none of the pertinent Bushmiller art
remained, or was readily available, so Hamrah understandably asked a
respected stylistic mimic to make up for the deficiency. That, at
least, is what I thought. I don’t see how Sikoryak’s name
alone would have tipped me off, as Ben Towle seems to think it should
have. Even if I’d known at the time that he was a well-known
for aping artistic styles, my reasoning, just outlined, would have
explained his presence in Hamrah’s article. The presence of a
stylistic mimic does not, in and of itself, mean a larger fraud is
being committed.

I
have a nodding acquaintance with Beckett’s work (a somewhat
more intimate knowledge of his famous play, “Waiting for
Godot”), but if Hamrah included any clues in his article that
it was a hoax, I didn’t then (and don’t now) know enough
to detect them. And what, after all, would have persuaded me that I
should check every “fact” in the piece to determine
whether or not it was genuine? I don’t approach every obscure
journal article as if it is potentially a hoax; why would I have done
so with this one? Only if my suspicions were sufficiently aroused by
the article’s being, as Spurgeon says, “too good to be
true.” But I’m just a humble typist: I haven’t
Tom’s perspicacity.

Instead,
given the peculiarities of Bushmiller’s approach to humor in
his comic strip and Beckett’s in “Godot,” I thought
the article’s truth was so good it must be accurate and
authentic. If the piece itself includes any clues, any hints that it
was all an absurd put-on, I missed them. When dealing with the
creator of Nancy and
the author of “Waiting for Godot,” what, exactly, is
“absurd”? How does one tell absurdities from existential
profundities? One can’t, Eastern Establishment smartypants
fingerpointers to the contrary notwithstanding. And therefore one
can’t discern the fraud—particularly in this hoax, which
is so well done, the impersonations and imitations so exact, so
perfectly executed, so exquisitely wrought.

Nope:
I couldn’t have known. The only way to know that a good hoax is
a hoax is to know that it’s a hoax. If it’s a good hoax,
someone has to tell you: “This is a hoax”—preferably
the perpetrator, the only unimpeachable authority on the subject.
That’s how Sturm, Towle, and Karasik know. They’re all
part of a milieu in which such information happily eddies back and
forth, whetting the appetites of the participants. Alas, I’m
not in that club. Nor am I a member of the Bushmiller Society. (Or
maybe I am, now, but it’s hard to say, “considering,”
as Paul Karasik wrote to me, “the secrecy of that austere
‘group.’”) I thought about asking Denis Kitchen,
the BS’s “Jimmy Olsen,” about the Hamrah piece
before posting my take on it; but I didn’t. Wouldn’t have
helped though: Kitchen tells me he learned about the
Bushmiller-Beckett hoax the same way I did, after the fact. No
matter. If a hoax deceives without any motive except to have fun,
then for the equation to be complete, someone must be deceived. Since
I don’t like to ruin anyone’s fun, I stepped right up.
I’m not particularly happy about it, but I am vastly amused by
it. And that’s enough. I have no choice but to grin and bear
it. I was snookered, pure and simple. (Well, maybe not so pure.) On
the other hand, I could claim that the hoax was so well done, the
impersonations and imitations so exact, so perfectly executed, so
exquisitely wrought, that no one could avoid being sucked in, thereby
absolving myself of any culpa and avoiding all this self-flagellation.

ONWARD,
THE SPREADING PUNDITRY

The
Great Ebb and Flow of Things

In
his farewell to world leaders attending the G8 summit, George W.
(“Wunderkind”) Bush, the GeeDubya of Lout, bid them all
“Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter,” and
punched the air and grinned. That’s our glorious leader, kimo
sabe. What can you expect from a guy for whom fart jokes represent
the epitome of uproarious humor?

Meanwhile,
at the Milford Daily News on July 22, “GHS” produced an editorial that enthused
about the Blitt New Yorker cover, saying: “It is reassuring to find that the grand old
American tradition of editorial cartooning, though much debilitated,
is not totally moribund.” GHS pooh-poohed the idea that the
cartoon would do any damage to Obama’s hopes: “Anyone who
took the cartoons seriously has problems well beyond anything The
New Yorker should worry about.” Then
the editorial concluded: “After the Obama campaign first
denounced the cover as ‘tasteless and offensive,’ the
candidate decided the better course was to brush it off, saying only
that it was unfortunate that the cover insulted Muslim Americans to
raise suspicions about himself. And there the matter rested until it
turned out that the Obama campaign had denied a seat on the
candidate’s trip to Iraq to New Yorker correspondent Ryan Lizza. It may have been
vindictive reprisal or it might have been, as Obama’s staff
insisted, a lack of space. But you can see how people might get the
wrong impression.” Hard to say. But Ryan Lizza had written a
long (and largely affirmative) report about Obama’s political
apprenticeship in Chicago that had been published in the very issue
of the magazine that had Blitt’s drawing on the cover. Lizza
concludes that Obama, far from being “some sort of
anti-establishment revolutionary,” is actually a canny
politician whose career “at every stage has been marked by an
eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than
tear them down or replace them.” That doesn’t seem
terrible to me. I don’t want another President who is willing
to tear down American institutions. One for the last eight years has
been quite enough, thank you. But did the Obama campaign really deny
a seat on the airplane to Lizza? It sounds too true to be good. But
the Milford Daily News—I
never heard of that. It may be a hoax, or the mysteriously
unexplained “GHS” may be a wicked satirist.